Does too many standards mean no standard? Ed Sperling and Esther Schindler ask a key question on ZDNet: "Will your XML talk to mine?"

XML may be the victim of the very possibilities that it creates. The article reports that "there are more than 500 XML standards for vertical industries".

This explosion is giving birth to initiatives to inventory and federate the vertical standards into "a horizontal solution where one size fits all".

In the meantime, this is giving new opportunities for the vendors to develop interoperability software and many see XSLT as a key component (or even a secret weapon) for heterogeneous XML communication.

But, XSLT is only a tool and, reminds Arofan Gregory in a talkback to the article, whatever technical issues you will tackle :

"The problem is really simple - we need to understand each other's semantics, or we don't know how to process the data coming in over the wire."