In the beginning, there was . . XML

2006 was the 15th anniversary of the web . . so it seemed appropriate to look forward to the next big thing on the internet after Extensible Markup Language (XML) . . , and ask Tim Bray, one of the founders of XML

According to Tim's technology standards mantra "simple beats complex" XBRL is still in early evolution stages with mostly "complex beating simple". He, amongst others, have argued for taming the beast to enable broader and deeper adoption in the mass market - such as an analyst tool for retail investors. Done right, the impact of XBRL could dwarf that of RSS and Atom put together. I’m on board, and anyone who believes “truthful business” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron should be too."

It's not quite clear what tools even relatively savvy retail investors will use, let alone pay for - the trick continues to be finding a fee paying model that's scalable. With the SEC funding $500,000 for these analytical tools and stipulating they must be built as open source products, it leaves a question mark about the commercial viability of building these tools. There are others that argue XBRL will be one of many threads in a sea of financial information that needs to be sifted in a manner that investors' tools can rapidly assimilate and act upon.

As the market shows interest in alternative reporting standards such as Ceres, Enhanced Business Reporting, company blogs and RSS, it's clear there's no silver bullet to this dynamically mutating challenge. Now, we're hearing of Web 3.0? basically the Semantic Web with technologies like RDF, Microformats, GRDDL and ContentLabels being just a few of the newer technologies that will form part of the vocabulary which we will all be rattling off in 2007, just like RSS, tagging and UGC were newer terms that entered the mainstream conversation in 2006. Notice how new VCs and their investments are now showing their faces in this new wave of metadata formation, discovery and more. Aggregate Knowledge Attensa and TouchStone are all new startups focused on getting users attention with metadata and reusing it's value either for advertising or discovery of new information.

Tim was invited to speak at the SEC discussion on Oct 3, and made some interesting observations about the potential behind interactive data (increasingly aliased from XBRL).

quote

Back to Interactive Data · Anyhow, here’s the dream: right now, if you know the name of a company, you can be pretty sure that by visiting www.company-name.com you can find the basics: where the offices are, who the CEO and Directors are, and so on. ¶
I imagine a future in which you can go to xbrl.company-name.com and be pretty sure of finding authoritative machine-readable financial data. And in this picture, Metcalfe’s Law applies in more than one way: not only does the value of the financial data increase as a strong function of how many companies are providing it, but the pressure to join in does too, on those companies who aren’t providing it.

XBRL ain’t perfect; they made no particular effort to hit any 80/20 points, so it’s big and sprawling and taxonomist-ridden and it tries to Solve the Whole Problem. In this particular case, I claim that the information is so valuable that it’s worth fighting through all this and finding a way to make it work.

In this vision, it‘s a whole lot harder for a management team gone bad to turn a decent company into a den of thieves.

Done right, the impact of XBRL oops Interactive Data could dwarf that of RSS and Atom put together. I’m on board, and anyone who believes “truthful business” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron should be too.

quote

Tim was the only person on the illustrious XBRL "experts" panel to admit we're at a starting point and we still have a long way to go to make XBRL part of the "financial plumbing" and efforts to sell XBRL into the pain within organizations in terms of legacy system integration (the holy grail or the holy grave) was a whole different ball game.

OK, back to Tim and his belief that we are now playing with a green field moving from HTML to SGML to XML to, more recently, blogging, ATOM, GData (new RSS), EC2 and GRID. Stay tuned to the adoption of these standards.

Other trends: dynamic languages versus scripted languages . . Overall, he appears to put his bet on the emerging acceptance of ATOM as the next big thing -- "ATOM has the potential to have the same impact as XML," Bray

The Innovators Dilemma

The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovators Solution are two great books to read . . As we approach the precipice to adoption of XBRL, it's worth listening to a scholar on the gotchas to innovation and why the road to success is paved with market boobytraps. The podcast is a little dated . . .March 2004, but simply timeless and one I like to listen to once in a while to remind myself that building a new business is more than just good ideas. wwww.innosight.com is a legacy to his work at HBS.

Nuts and Bolts of Electronic Trading

Simply a great link to trends in capital markets. .

What's next . . "stay hungry, stay foolish!"

Change may come in the form of a database, applications or integration solutions. Is this the time for the next wave of Enterprise Application Integration solutions aka EAI 2.0? Some people in the business reporting world claim we are ripe for a breakthrough as big as Visicalc. while other people predict a somewhat daunting future depending on your POV, see googlezon

The humble spreadsheet harnessed the power of the microprocessor to millions of PC users. It was and remains the only significant programming tool used by millions of people who know nothing of simple programming such as compiling, scripting, or even simple looping. It provides a simple method of assembling data sources to create a custom "application". The application is really part of a business process, most often a financial process. A "smart spreadsheet" loaded by tagged data for business processes would be a powerful way to unlock collaboration and process knowledge and mitigate the ever growing costs of regulatory reporting and compliance. Sarbox costs -- be gone!

Here's the raw data . . 2006 will see the number of personal blogs exceed 60 million. The number of new blogs created daily will rise to over 100,000 a day or more than one per second. Howver, many analysts are saying that the relevance, average quality and value of each blog will decline pointing to the stat. that over half of all blogs cease to be active within three months of their creation, and only 13 percent of all blogs are updated more than once a week. However, although some say it will be increasingly difficult to find quality blogs, they miss the point. This is the best spot for CEO blogs that I've been able to find.

"...Growth in the numbers of blogs tracked by Technorati continues to grow briskly. While the doubling of the blogosphere has slowed a bit (every 236 days or so), interest in blogging remains considerable. About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months."

"The integration of blogs and traditional media sites on the web continues. Technorati has put together the top 100 sites that make up "The short head" (as opposed to "the long tail"), which is still predominantly made up of traditional media sites, like The New York Times, Yahoo! News, CNN, and MSNBC."

"By the time you reach the top 5000, blogs have essentially taken over, with very few well-funded mainstream media sites listed." For the full monty of graphics and analysis, check out the full report.

Information disssemination is becoming more fluid and a new form of intermediary will likely emerge: the blog (or ideally somethings that includes the larger world of semantic data) aggregator will emerge, most likely funded by advertising, and specilaized in identifying the best quality content . . segway to a coffee meeting I had with the leaders of Monitor110 (I think that's read Monitor One One Zero, but I could be mistaken) and their recent $11 million financing . . where the FT reported on a seemingly innovative search/news aggregation idea aimed at the financial trading community aka ‘hedge funds.’ Basically it is touted as a revolution in information gathering, digging out the nuggets that exist below the radar screen of the conventional or mainstream press.

They do sound like they have some smart people and decent technology so it may be a useful toy - - however, I suspect the really smart money traders who have known how to search blogs and use RSS readers and tagging and social-bookmarking services etc. will be a bit miffed that any old trader will be (in theory) able to find the same gems of information by paying up for Monitor110’s services. The ground Monitor110 is breaking has been tried before by Clearforest and Relegence and other less known startups for some time now and digital generation traders can mash-up their own intelligent news filters either from scratch or using tools like Netvibes. And beware this space was hyped up by Majestic Research who quickly faultered and fell on their sword.

Edward Hadas over at breakingviews.com (another paywall, but really good analysis site founded by Hugo Dixon) compares it to using the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to trade. ‘Wisdom of crowd’ - mining would be things like Marketocracy and SocialPicks.

Monitor110 is all about finding the needle in the haystack; finding the individual voice or nugget that escapes crowd amplification. Finding the kernel before it becomes a snowball. Beware the paradox of diminishing returns, however: the more people find the needle the more difficult it will be to monetize. Or paraphrasing Dash - ‘if everybody is special, it really just means that nobody is…’ I'm bullish on their assumptions and wish the founders well.

Is it so far fetched to envisage (a future) Google Money and (a future) iPod converging and delivering the killer app, iMoney - - making investing as cool as turning on a music file. Don't rest on your iPod laurels Steve Jobs - we need your brilliance ("stay hungry, stay foolish")! We are indeed in strange times where innovation is being stimulated by government regulators and accountants. Perhaps their time has come - when was the last major shake up in accounting - double-entry bookkeeping? . . a 1,000 years ago.

Regulatory shove - we're doing it, no really!

Mark the date -- Sep 26, 2006 - change to interactive data is now inevitable. The SEC has turned a corner and truly made it clear that talking up XBRL is not enough, it's now time to walk the talk, and they're putting their money where their mouth is . . . this is now a 10-bagger!

COUNT ONE! SEC announced a $54 million investment to update the commission's EDGAR financial statement filing system to XBRL,

COUNT TWO! An announcement of an SEC roundtable on ”interactive data" to be held October 3.

COUNT THREE! The two announcements came on the heels of news that the SEC's small business roundtable slated on September 29, will focus, in part on, interactive data - the new buzz word for XBRL.

This triple whammy from the SEC is a clear signal that companies will HAVE to be XBRL compliant within a year, since Cox said this morning that the SEC's coding, taxonomy, and technology efforts will be done within a year. All current EDGAR filings will be switched over to XBRL inside of a year, and more telling, the SEC website will be peppered with XBRL software tools to help investors and analysts use the data "in interesting ways," says Cox. The chairman even noted this morning that developers should begin to "exploit" XBRL's potential by writing whiz-bang software and tools for companies, investors, and analysts.

Streamline Enterprise Business Reporting with XBRL Jeff Thompson, Institute of Management Accountants

We're doing it . . SEC

Business Wire hosted a webinar on Sep 13 inviting the SEC's Corey Booth and others to answer questions on the adoption of interactive data. . . sounds like business-speak is finally "in" and geek-speak is fashionably out in the world of XBRL "XBRL is such an ugly word," Booth. He finally gets it.

Booth went on to to say that he estimates there were about 40 companies that were part of the SEC interactive data program and he expected many more to join. While it's uncertain where and when the tipping point will be reached for mass adoption of interactive data, Booth did say that the SEC is looking at their options more carefully for moving beyond adoption. . . and alluded to several RFPs that were underway to solicit guidance from vendors to help the SEC in their transition to use XBRL data. While it became more and more clear why the SEC is moving on this -- driven by Congress and coupled with SOX initiatives demanding that the SEC review a higher number of company filings - in the order of 40% over a three year span, the value prop. for the issuer still appeared somewhat illusory as depicted by the panel. Without citing specific quantitative benefits, issuers were left with an unsettling feeling that this is yet another "digital" wave about to blow their way with far reaching consequences and obvious benefits somewhere in the business reporting supply chain (oops, sorry for using that overused phrase, but apparently all good XBRL citizens, heady with the XBRL coolaid, are meant to refer to this term and associated visual to the point where we're all supposed to nod in unison, and mutter "...hmm, aha, eureka, yes. .").

While Booth speaks well for the regulator(s), he leaves the issuer with a nervous feeling about their benefits and the need for immediate action. While the regulators represent institutions to be respected and followed outside the US, the financial shinanigans in the US markets in 2001 followed by SarBox attempt to reign the markets in, have left US issuers more than just a little reticent about following US regulators -- when there is a choice.

Kudos to Business Wire and Michael Becker for moderating an excellent discussion and extracting some valuable insights from the panel in a masterly conversational form that made it a pleasure to listen (and even podcast!) in . Thank you, Michael for asking the tough questions and for making it sound so easy.

One view of things to come, . . perhaps

As publishing/syndication methods morph it is interesting to look at where this maybe going. The new syndication methods are all about making content simultaneously available for use (and re-use) for a variety of purposes.

Syndication has its roots in the publication industry where it means "to sell (a comic strip or column, for example) through a syndicate for simultaneous publication in newspapers or periodicals." In recent years, the term has applied to web content, making the same content simultaneously available for multiple purposes. The most common uses of syndicated content are:

• to provide fresh, up-to-date information (i.e., news headlines, stock prices, weather forecasts, etc.) for incorporation into a web site; or
• to monitor an existing web site for changes.

One can extend the syndication concept to encompass many additional information reuse possibilities, including:

• transforming channel content into an outline format (OPML),
  
• allowing the content to be manipulated in outline processing tools; subscribing to a channel using KlipFolio,
  
• a desktop utility that provides real-time notification of changes to a channel; subscribing to a channel as smart tags in Microsoft Office XP, allowing Office application to automatically hyperlink channel item names appearing in Office documents; direct access to all channel content in XML form,
  
• subscribing to a channel using all standard RSS variations (e.g., 0.91, 0.92, 1.0. 2.0) as well as variations that include extensions for content security information;
  
• and many more.

Now, from this to . . a lively view of things to come in You Won't Recognize the Capital Markets in 2015 by Sean Park of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein -- who draws on a compelling set of fictitious events that portent change in the capital markets . . . and makes the ominous prediction that as technology advances, investors' needs shift and regulations allow for new business models, sell-side firms will compete directly with stock exchanges sometime during the upcoming decade. Quite entertaining!

Other interesting interviews can be heard at podcasts, in particular, the IBM 2015 survey report.

HF Regulator adopts Electronic Filing

2006-08-24

E-Reporting Initiative: Minor Changes in Data Collection Will Provide Significant Positive Benefits

GRAND CAYMAN (Thursday, 24 August 2006)

When the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority's (CIMA) electronic reporting initiative comes on stream in early 2007, for CIMA-regulated funds with a December 2006 year-end, fund managers will submit, in a prescribed manner, their annual reporting requirements using a secure, streamlined and paperless system.

CIMA will then have accurate, electronic data, extracted mostly from audited accounts, for use in reporting aggregate information on the fund industry.

The Authority believes the change in how fund information is filed - not the information itself -- will represent a marked improvement to the submission process.

"The system we are seeking to develop will eliminate redundant data requirements, align reporting to make use of more of the data that regulated entities use for their own purposes, and minimise ad hoc requests from us to those entities, thereby making CIMA more effective in its regulatory oversight," said Mr. Gary Linford, Head of Investment and Securities for the Authority.

He added: "CIMA-regulated funds will not need to file 'information on transactions' as recently reported in an online media, nor is CIMA seeking to increase its prudential regulation of hedge funds beyond the existing regulatory framework. The initiative will allow us to significantly improve our compilation of aggregate statistics on the 8,000 funds regulated in our jurisdiction. This will better enable CIMA to meet the needs of our stakeholders for reliable, representative industry statistics, such as size, growth, change, market share, and investments by and in funds."

Mr. Linford stressed that the information submitted has always been and will continue to be managed in an extremely confidential manner. "In no way will fund- or manager-specific information be made available to the public, only aggregate industry statistics."

Demand for such data from industry and others is high, but as the Authority currently does not have the mechanisms in place to collect the relevant data from manual reports, aggregate statistics on Cayman's fund industry are not available. For example, to report total assets under management by CIMA-regulated funds would currently require manually reviewing each set of audited accounts held in paper form - e-filing will change all of that.

"The industry has been supportive of this move," said Mr. Linford, who added that the Authority undertook a consultation exercise with the private sector to seek input. "Many of the investment managers and service providers with whom we have had dialogue are relieved to hear that meaningful statistics on the industry will soon be available from a credible source."

With the growth rate in CIMA-regulated funds, electronic reporting will also enable the Authority to maintain the appropriate supervisory capacity without a proportionate increase in staff.

Additional details on the objectives and features of the e-filing initiative is available from CIMA.

This brief provides a list of the information to be collected, explains why operators of regulated funds will need to submit the information and confirms the operational benefits of the e-reporting initiative.

CFO Blog : Tiny XBRL

CFO Blog: Ron's Rant

The SEC announced today (September 5, 2006) that its next Small Business Forum, scheduled for Friday, September 29, will focus on interactive data. "Interactive data" is a code phrase for XBRL, which, in turn, is code for the Internet-language method of tagging financial data. (In other words, I suppose, it's code for code for code.)

Nudging companies to adopt XBRL has become somewhat of a pet project of Chairman Cox.

As CFO.com reported, the SEC has shied away from requiring companies to adopt XBRL, even though Chairman Cox argues publicly that it would make financial statements easier for investors to use and compare. But that doesn't mean that the chairman doesn't do his share of prodding. An XBRL pilot program has attracted 25 big companies to adopt the method, and Cox has asked software vendors to develop a tool for the SEC's EDGAR online filing system, which is where public company financials are filed.

Now it looks like the chairman is aiming his XBRL prod at smaller companies—the same companies that went to the mat with Cox over Sarbox Section 404, calling for a scaled-back version because they said the internal controls regulations were too onerous and costly for small companies to bear.

Wouldn't small companies be likely to feel the same way about implementing XBRL? By some estimates, it's not a particularly expensive proposition. Yet even with incentives from the SEC, most of the 25 companies willing to volunteer for the XBRL pilot program were large and "appear to have some commercial interest in [XBRL's] widespread adoption," writes Alix Stuart in her article XBR-What?.

So what are the odds that the chairman's prodding will convince smaller companies to jump on the XBRL cattle car? Skeptics abound at companies of all sizes. Witness Comcast controller Lawrence Salva, who told the SEC at a roundtable that "The payback is difficult to quantify," or Bill Ferko, CFO of Genlyte Group, who expressed support for the goal of transparency, but noted "XBRL really doesn't do that much for the company, for the registrant."

Let's see what the small-business contingent has to say on September 29.

ComplianceWeek, Tigger or Eeyore!

A rather poorly researched op-ed on XBRL by the editor of ComplianceWeek, Scott Cohen. But, still, its of note to read the current journalistic view of XBRL as reported to its readers in the investor relations and governance groups inside public companies.

It was somewhat disturbing and sad to read the editors comments on XBRL. Disturbing for two reasons. Firstly, it points to the lack of serious industry journalistic coverage of the business or market drivers for a global accounting standard that has been incubated, piloted, deployed over the past 8 years with obvious implementation successes, and secondly, it seems to suggest a rather “head in the sand” point of view that “we should let the capital markets work their magic to solve this problem.” It is sad to see the editor of a “compliance” magazine stoop to such dramatic headlines (XBRL Hell!) without doing the minimum required research to better serve its readership. “Eye candy?!” And puzzling nonetheless to see why a magazine focused on compliance issues should be so flippant about “letting the markets work their magic.” But then, it has always been far easier to be an Eeyore than a Tigger!

While the Editor focuses on the SEC program as the driving force and chides the regulators efforts to build a critical mass of early adopters, he completely misses the point in terms of why public companies need to, and will adopt a financial reporting standard that safeguards the accuracy and timeliness of public company disclosures. It is a point often missed when a technology is first hitting the market and is receiving understandable and predictable, anemic market uptake. While the majority of reporting and compliance people in any company are hired to perform a role that deals in very critical and visible information sharing in a very methodical and structured manner, and are managed by CFOs, IROs or Compliance Officers who are charged with policing the release of public information, the manner in which company information gets transported and ultimately consumed suffers systemic problems that are outside the control of these diligent and well meaning reporting groups. It would serve the Editor well to survey a handful of public companies and track the root cause of reporting problems, such as a correction in the media, such as improperly interpreted line items from their footnotes or base financial tables, such as the impact of some company restatements that stem from known poor internal information gathering.

So, while the editor should take comfort in knowing that XBRL is complex because information companies disclosures can be very complex, and XBRL is merely a reflection of a reality that isn’t going to change – highly complex, company specific, industry specific, geographical guided, regulator shaped, accounting rule based public disclosures, he should also be cognizant of the fact that solutions have emerged to make the process of adopting XBRL as easy as updating an Excel worksheet. While it may be useful to “talk XBRL” and rebut the technical issues cited in the editorial, it would serve your readers better to know that the benefits of XBRL are far larger, near term, and early adopters are now shouting louder than the noise that has filled the Eeyore’s camp.

So, let’s address the article specifically.

First, the editor claims that US adoption of XBRL filing has been desultory. Well, one could argue that the SEC reeling under the pressures first to enforce SOX by Congress, then to review and moderate SOX by the market, adopted a more pragmatic position with XBRL by launching a voluntary program. The SEC now has some 30 companies creating XBRL files and is hoping to reach the 100+ company mark in the next 6 months. While the numbers may seem small as a percentage of total company’s filing, they have grown by an order of magnitude in 12 months and continue to rise especially with the new messaging to publish accurately and instantly without burdening the reporting groups with any additional work.

While a tipping point hasn’t been reached, changing market behavior with little immediate benefit until infomediaries and analysts institutionalize XBRL usage will continue to be a challenge. However, beyond compliance to the SEC’s directive, public companies are slowly beginning to understand that they have a reporting problem that directly impacts their company. And, while the SEC has its own analysis problem – the ability to process up to 40% of a million filings a year, public companies are suffering a (possible permanent) downturn in analyst coverage, media journalists improperly retyping facts about their company and investors reading information that has been filtered and massaged by junior data entry operators with little or no quality control.

The Editor cites costs and ROI as a barrier. Misperception. It takes a company accountant 1 or 2 hours (yes, hours!) to review an Excel template as they are starting up to file in XBRL for the very first time. Subsequent filings in XBRL are completely transparent and require no additional work (yes, no additional work!). This new publishing platform – coined EarningsDirect via the Intelligent Financial Statement, developed by an innovative teaming effort by Business Wire and CoreFiling, costs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the complexity of reporting and pays for itself instantly with the first filing alleviating the inherent problems in transporting the same information to the analysts in the traditional manner.

The Editor would better serve its readers by highlighting a common and widespread external reporting problem for all public companies and understanding how this accounting standard can be used to eliminate these problem – and, to highlight that XBRL continues to be debated inside the financial reporting community to address the broader issues of taking financial information and moving it across the many silos of information consumers both inside companies and its external stakeholders.

Time will tell whether interactive data or some other bold initiative by infomediaries will incent the market to adopt electronic tagging for financial disclosure. Certainly, while the process appears easy, describing business in accounting terms including all the nuances of a specific company and making sure it is consumed consistently is unlikely to be an autopilot operation any time soon - as alluded to by Sun CEO J. Schwartz in his recent blog, although there are some interesting textual analysis and statistical mining "smarts" that may alleviate the problem as demand for electronic tagging catches hold - more later.

As a result of misguided information like this one in ComplianceWeek, IROs/CFOs are still holding on to the view "tell me when I have to do it, and I'll do it, . .otherwise (door slam!)."

John Udells interview podcast Aug 2006

XML for business reporting gains momentum

Two years ago I wrote an unflattering report on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), an emerging standard that aims to improve the speed, accuracy, and transparency of business and financial reporting. I applauded the goals, as we all should in the wake of Enron and other scandals, but worried about the complexity of the 151-page XBRL specification, its aggressive use of esoteric features of XML, and its reliance on accounting "taxonomies" defined by committees. I've too often seen these kinds of ambitious efforts stumble and give way to simpler approaches. SGML gave way to XML, for example, and while XML itself offers many advanced features, its most successful application -- RSS -- uses none of them. Would XBRL wind up being used mainly by what one wag called a "master race" of consultants and accountants? [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

In last week's podcast, XBRL's inventor, Charlie Hoffman, assured me I'm not the only one to express these concerns. Just this week, for example, when the SEC announced its Request for Proposal for the development of XBRL-based software, Dave Winer echoed them:

Sounds like the SEC is wanting to re-invent RSS?

Although I felt and to some extent still feel that way about XBRL, I have a much more complete understanding of the issues after researching, recording, and editing the podcast. It runs way longer than the others in my series, almost 70 minutes (edited down from 90), but I think the material warrants that lengthy treatment. Charlie Hoffman doesn't want to reinvent RSS, he wants to reinvent accounting, and he speaks as an accountant not an XML geek.

<< Friday, August 11, 2006 >>

A conversation with Charlie Hoffman and Brian DeLacey about XBRL

Charlie Hoffman, the director of industry solutions for UBmatrix, is acknowledged as "the father of XBRL" -- the eXtensible Business Reporting Language to which I had a bit of an allergic reaction when I first encountered it a couple of years ago. But when Brian DeLacey, a researcher turned XBRL entrepeneur, suggested that I interview Charlie I jumped at the chance. In this week's podcast the three of us discuss the history of XBRL, its relationship to XML, its goals, its successes, and its challenges.

In next week's InfoWorld column I'll write more about what I learned from this long and fascinating conversation. But in a nutshell, though my criticisms of XBRL's complexity were and are valid -- as Charlie Hoffman admits -- the real story is (as always) much more nuanced. The inherent complexity of accounting standards, the competitive forces at work in the realm of global finance, the regulatory pressure being brought to bear -- these and other factors form the context in which the development of XBRL must be understood.

It's worth noting that while XBRL is a complex beast that makes aggressive use of certain advanced features of XML, Charlie Hoffman isn't (or anyway wasn't originally) an XML geek. He's an accountant who, as you'll hear in this interview, is deeply grounded in the practice of his trade. That makes this story an interesting contrast to the development of many of the web services standards I've studied.