Saturday, December 30, 2000

eBusiness Technologies Submits Two Notes to the World Wide Web Consortium

eBusiness Technologies (eBT), a leading provider of solutions and services for e-business applications, has announced that Gavin Nicol, the Company's Chief Scientist and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Advisory Committee representative, has submitted two Notes to the W3C.

One Note, titled XEXPR Language Definition, would ease the requirement of using XML in conjunction with a scripting language, which often results in a scripting language being bound within the XML content. The Note defines XEXPR, a scripting language that uses XML as its primary syntax, thereby making is easily embeddable in an XML document, and allowing XML tools to manipulate the scripted content of documents.

The other Note, XTND-XML Transition Network Definition, defines an XML-based format to enable the integration and interchange of different sets of states and the transitions between them. The intent of XTND is to define an XML-based interchange format for process definitions. Such definitions could facilitate e-business and eCommerce by fueling interoperability between different workflow engines used in end-to-end business processes, including such functions as editorial review (e.g. creating and reviewing content) and business process automation (e.g. order processing).

"The W3C is the most open standards body and the center point for Internet-related technologies," said James Ringrose, president and CEO of eBT. "An XML-based scripting language and transition network format will enable organizations to maintain greater flexibility and control over Web content and the business processes they operate and with which they interoperate. eBT is pleased to submit these Notes to the W3C to further the discussion on these important topics."

eBT was a founding member of the W3C. Nicol is a member of the working group or interest group at the following W3C activities: XML, XLL, XSL, DOM and SVG.

Egghead.com and Ticketmaster.com Top List of Website Failures The Week Before Christmas
Many of the top e-commerce Websites couldn't process orders for more than 30 minutes a day the week before Christmas, according to a study by WatchDog247.com, a national Website monitoring company.

"Our estimate is that Egghead.com lost more than $1 million of revenue during the last week of the peak holiday season because buyers couldn't access their Website," says Markus Allen, president of WatchDog247.com. "Most Website owners are unaware that their site is frequently down and as a result their customers can't place online orders ... costing companies a lot of money."

WatchDog247.com monitored 20 popular e-commerce Websites during the final leg of the holiday shopping season and tabulated the average downtime per day (in minutes):

Company and Downtime
1 Metricom - down 151 minutes per day
2 Egghead.com - down 90 minutes per day
3 CNET - down 42 minutes per day
4 Ticketmaster Online - down 41 minutes per day
5 eBay - down 37 minutes per day
6 Autobytel.com - down 34 minutes per day
7 At Home - down 32 minutes per day
8 eToys - down 30 minutes per day
9 Disney Internet - down 18 minutes per day
10 Earthlink - down 11 minutes per day
11 NetZero - down 10 minutes per day
12 Amazon.com - down 8 minutes per day
13 MarketWatch.com - down 5 minutes per day
14 About.com - down 4 minutes per day
15 Multex - down 4 minutes per day
16 NBC Internet - down 3 minutes per day
17 Net.Bank - down 3 minutes per day
18 Drugstore.com - down 2 minutes per day
19 TheStreet.com - down 1 minute per day
20 Yahoo! - down 1 minute per day

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