
can change several times during a month. If the information is available on
a Web site, customers can always access the latest, most up-to-date infor-
mation.
Currently, the price list is published in HTML—that is, intended for view-
ing by a human. This is acceptable if you have few providers with few prod-
ucts but as soon as you have many providers or many products, you want
an automated solution.
With XML, software can automatically visit the price list, extract the price,
and update the information in your own database. This is shown in the top
half of Figure 1.9. It requires a markup language that does not concentrate
on appearance but on structure. ...