What is XML, and Why Should You Care?--McIlroy

So much of the excitement around XML ties into its strengths in supporting commerce, specifically to enable e-commerce applications. That's the reason why heavyweights like Microsoft, IBM and Sun endorse it.

Publishers appreciate e-commerce as much as the next Web user, but have some of their own reasons for falling in love with XML's promise. Among the primary reasons is that XML encoding would offer the basis for dynamic, cross-media publishing. Web publishing software can work with XML codes as easily as print software (perhaps even more so). Once a stream of text has been coded with XML tags, it can be published very rapidly into both print and Web formats, without manual intervention.