With the ink barely dry on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s extensible markup language (XML), San Diego Mac developer Media Design in*Progress has released Interaction 2.0, which it claims is the first application to take advantage of server-side XML. A web server companion, Interaction 2.0 adds threaded discussion and chat rooms to MacOS-based web servers. XML was designed to replace HTML with a structured, extensible document markup regime. In adding customizable tags to the web author’s tool kit, however, the new standard has come under fire from critics who fear that mutually incomprehensible dialects will Balkanize the net. Not so, according to in*Progress’s Terje Norderhaug. Quite to the contrary, server-side XML brings order to chaos, he says. At present, he explains, web software vendors use a wide variety of languages for proprietary server-side programming. Putting XML in the spotlight will hopefully give web software vendors the direction to adhere to one shared standard, Norderhaug concludes, the benefits should be obvious.
