Dell prepares to go global with XML

The move is a vote of confidence for the much-hyped successor to HTML, which allows Dell automatically to update pricing details across pages written in 17 different languages. This is because XML essentially reduces a page to a set of objects.

The firm's European ebusiness web site was reworked using XML earlier this year. A plan to do the same with other sites worldwide has now been brought forward to next month.

Dell operates one of the world's most successful ebusinesses, with global sales of around $11 billion a year.

'As ecommerce gets bigger and bigger it will get more resource-intensive, said Gordon Ballantyne, director of Dell Europe, Middle East and Africa Online. 'If you apply technologies such as XML you can get a massive reduction in overheads.

Before Dell rolled out phase one of the three-phase XML project in March, changing the price of products with multiple configurations would have involved dozens of web page edits.

The worldwide deployment means that plan has been put back to the first quarter of next year. Currently, changes to web pages have to be made at set points during the day, instead of being reflected immediately on the web site.

XML: HOW IT WORKS

Like HTML, XML is a document format for the web, only more flexible.

The data within an HTML document is described by 'tags', which are predefined and lumped together. XML, however, allows developers to define their own 'tags' such as product or price. Unlike HTML, XML treats display, content and meaning separately, allowing it to be used as a way for databases to exchange information across the Internet. For example, a building contractor could capture pricing information on a particular type of brick over the web, and then feed it automatically into an estimating package.