The divide between theory and practice is never more pronounced than in the technology sector. Take Britain's Mars probe Beagle 2, which went missing at the end of 2003. The region of Isidis Planitia, just north of the Martian equator, was selected as a landing site because it seemed to offer a compromise between safety and interesting geology in the search for life. Subsequently, a high-resolution satellite image of the target area revealed a one kilometre-wide crater in the centre. No wonder Beagle 2 was unable to broadcast on Christmas Day. What looked watertight on the drawing board mysteriously started letting in water as soon as the real world came into focus. Can the same be said of extensible markup language (XML), which - in theory - is technology's Rosetta Stone? Developed in 1998, XML is a means of unifying all the disparate databases in the world through creating a structured document format that any computer, running on any kind of network and operating system, can read (see box, page 27). In practice, however, once XML stuck its head above the parapet, technology vendors quickly started creating their own versions of XML that catered for particular market sectors and interest areas. The danger became that XML-enabled IT systems could not in fact talk to each other as they were using different flavours of the language, negating XML's major selling point.
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