The internet is analogous to a very large library where all the books
             are scattered on the floor. This is because it contains so much
             information, but there is no organizational system for sorting through the
             information. "Many people have expended a lot of time and effort over the
             years to try to put some order into this chaos but with varying degrees of
             success." (Wiseman 113). The eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, aims to
             take on the electronic clutter and organize it in a way that everyone can
             use. Although XML promises to bring drastic organizational changes to the
             internet, it is not a new concept. In fact, businesses have been using "a
             collection of standard message formats and element dictionaries to exchange
             data" for the past twenty-five years (Wiseman 114). This type of formatting
             for electronic commerce is called Electronic Data Interchangeâ€"EDIâ€"and has
             allows businesses to trade information necessary to their functioning.
             It is for this reason that XML has sometimes been called "the poor
             man's EDI" or "EDI for everyone," XML brings organization to the common
             man's electronic world, while EDI has structured corporate commerce since
             the dawn of the information age. EDI's foundations can be traced back to
             1948 "during the Berlin airlift when Ed Guilbert of the Department of
             Defense spearheaded the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee."
             (Rifkin 29). This group needed to get various modes of transportation to
             share data like schedules and coordinate with each other to effectively
             deliver supplies. The establishment of this group eventually led to the
             formation of the X12 committee, which was accredited by the American
             National Standards institute in 1979. "Large petroleum, banking,
             transportation, and retailing companies and the federal government soon
             began using X12 EDI to provide electronic forms and messages for shipping...