We have been doing business for thousands of years. Now we want to do business electronically. In my opinion, there are two ways this can happen.

1. We can change all of our business and legal practices to optimize electronic data processing.
2. We can structure data processing to model our business and legal practices.

A traditional business transaction is an exchange of documents. XML documents model existing financial and commercial data very well.

I believe that the rapid adoption of XML is evidence that we are choosing ease of data management over ease of programming.