This might not seem special to others, but I thought it was very 
interesting to see a reference to XML in my morning postal mail the other day.

In my mail, from the Government of Canada's tax department, was a 
bunch of forms and some information regarding filing business taxes 
for my company.

A flyer was included titled "News for Electronic Filers", and 
included (amongst other information) the following two titled paragraphs:

===8<---
Internet filing

Original and amended T4, T4A, T4RSP, T4RIF, and T4A-NR returns can 
now be filed using our "Internet File Transfer (XML)" 
application.  For information, visit our Web site at www.cra.gc.ca/t4internet

Avoid processing delays

Your submission must conform to our eXtensible Markup Language (XML) 
specifications.  Returns filed in other formats will not be accepted 
and will be considered not filed.  You must verify your submission 
using a validating parser to ensure that your submission is correct, 
and so we can process it.  You can find validating parser software on 
the internet.
===8<---

Except for spelling "eXtensible" incorrectly by capitalizing the "X" 
(the standard document does not have a capital "X") I thought it was 
neat that my government is promoting the use of XML to the general 
public and felt it sufficient to use the succinct description above 
to get people familiar with the technology to use it.

And looking on their web site, the XML guidelines go back to 2002.

Now, did we use it?  Actually, no ... we only have to file two T4 
slips and my wife had already used their simple web interface to do 
so before I noticed the flier mentioned XML.  We aren't electronic 
filers, so the form didn't get looked at.

But a company with thousands or even just hundreds of T4 slips would 
probably have their information in a database and I was pleased at 
the thought that they could merely create a database query to create 
an XML instance that could be validated by the government schema and 
then filed.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

--
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G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@C...
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/x/
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