and purchasing." (Rifkin 30). In 1979, the American National Standards
             Institute Accredited Standards Committee X12 began to develop uniform
             standards for the electronic exchange of business transactions in standards
             known as Electronic Data Interchange.
             The standards established by the Accredited Standards Committee aim to
             establish a widely accepted computer language enabling electronic
             commercial transactions to occur. Today, "They comprise more than three-
             hundred transaction sets that allow businesses to execute nearly every type
             of business-to-business operation electronically, such as orders, invoices,
             customs declarations, statistics, insurance documents, bills of transport,
             and many healthcare transactions." (Rifkin 32). EDI has been endorsed
             internationally by the United Nations, and was even adopted by the United
             States federal government in 1997 under President Bill Clinton. Since its
             conception EDI has been instrumental in standardizing electronic commerce
             between businesses, but with the advent of the internet many business
             transactions have completely changed in form. The internet has brought
             electronic commerce to all types of consumers, and this is what has made
             To understand XML it should first be judged against its predecessor,
             Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML
             ...