Can Your Computer Speak Fluent XML?

ByJohn Teresko By using XML, the Internet language of many Web pages, information is described in a way that allows computers to exchange information and automatically act on it. To ascertain if your systems are fluent (comply with voluntary industry standards) consider the major expansion of software tests now available from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Md. Testing ensures that a system can communicate flawlessly with others using the language. In addition to the XML tests, NIST computer scientists have released software tests for the Document Object Model (DOM). DOM is an application programming interface for XML and HTML that lets people or computers dynamically access and update Web pages. The XML Conformance Test Suite and a companion test suite for DOM contains more than 4,000 test files. It can be downloaded from www.nist.gov