"This initiative is focused on solving real-world business problems. CXML will help build open trading communities across industries. Buyers and sellers reduce online business costs by facilitating exchange of content and transactions over the Internet."
-- Skip Folds, Manger of Content Strategy, Ariba Corporation

A significant impediment in the growth of business-to-business E-commerce is on its way to extinction. Commerce XML (cXML) , a new set of document type definitions (DTDs) for the Extensible Markup Language (XML), will be released to the public in March 99 for an open comment period and pilot testing.

cXML is an explicit meta-language to describe the characteristics of items available for sale. It enables the development of ''intelligent shopping agents'' that help to do the dirty work of corporate purchasing. By programming the characteristics you''re seeking into request messages and releasing them to the network, your request will return exactly what you''re seeking or nothing at all - which in itself is sometimes important to know. Think of cXML loosely in terms of ''bar coding'' for the Web, but with a far richer set of attributes to uniquely identify and describe products, and can be incorporated into computer programs.