An important new way of writing Web pages is making its way closer to the Web mainstream.
Infoseek, one of the Web's largest search engines, said Thursday that it will make new searching software available next week -- software that can interpret documents encoded with the eXtensible Markup Language, better known as XML.
It's not the first time a software company has supported the language, but it is the first significant backing from a major search company. Many believe XML is the key to improving accessibility to information on the Web.
"We believe XML is going to be an important advance in the navigability of Web content," said Infoseek spokeswoman Dora Futterman.
"It's a bold move, and I commend them for it," said Tim Bray, an independent programmer and co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, which was recommended as a standard by the World Wide Web Consortium in February. "Infoseek is making a reasonable bet that there is going to be a lot of XML around and [that] searching it is going to be in demand."
While HTML is used to instruct Web browsers on the appearance of Web pages, XML describes the information they contain, from paragraphs to pictures to headlines. The markup tags of the language can describe a paragraph about cars, for example, or categorize a document as a political essay.
If XML becomes a universal format for structuring data, everything from classified ads to news articles to recipes to search engines will be more orderly and the Web will be a more useful place, according to XML advocates.
"I want a higher level of understanding of what's going on [the Web]," said developer Dave Winer, who also welcomed the Infoseek news.
The company will support XML in a new version of proprietary software it will sell to Web sites and corporate network managers beginning Tuesday. Called Ultraseek Server 3.0, the software is designed to add search capabilities to the Web pages and other documents stored on Web sites and company networks.
"On [company] intranets, content is growing like crazy as more and more people get Web-authoring technology," Futterman said. The proliferation of pages is creating chaos for some networks. "The webmaster is losing control over where the data is and what it looks like." The new product will help fix that, he said.
Chaos prevails on the Web, too. The Web community still has to agree on an XML classification standard for the Internet at large. At that point, Infoseek will look at deploying the technology on its main Web search engine.
"What we're waiting for on the Web at large is for [a standard] to become adopted and become widespread," Futterman said.
Bray agreed. "As of now, there is not much XML on the Internet. Where it's being put to work is in internal applications."
Oracle and Microsoft, giants in corporate-productivity software, have added their high-profile support to the language, Bray said.
He recommended a wait-and-see attitude toward the success of the Infoseek software, however.
"Software that can index and search [XML-based documents] with high performance in a scalable way is extremely difficult to construct," Bray said. "So this is good but let's first have a look at the software."
