Wondering what tools does support XML today? Well, Many of the top SGML vendors have made generalized XML versions of their products available. These include ArborText ADEPT 7 (http://www.arbortext.com/) and Inso DynaBase (http://www.inso.com/), Chrystal Software Astoria (http://www.chrystal.com/), and POET Object Server (http://www.poet.com/) for authoring, editing and database publishing. And, there are plenty of XML data analysis tools too.

Other vendors, such as DataChannel (http://www.datachannel.com/), have products based on XML for data management. See http://www.microsoft.com/xml/ for a listing of some of these tools.

Which companies have promised XML support in their products in the near future?

Allaire Corp., ExperTelligence Inc., InterMax Solutions Inc., Pictorius Inc., Powersoft Corp., and SoftQuad Inc. recently committed to providing XML support in their products by March 1998. Webfosys Networks is expected to follow pretty soon as well!

Where will the tools come from in the future?

Microsoft expects a wide variety of applications to be developed in the coming months that convert information currently stored in documents and databases into XML for delivery to the desktop. In addition, Microsoft expects XML-centric databases, rich authoring and application developer tools, and data format-specific tools such as wizards to be developed as new vocabularies are defined.