XFDL: Creating Electronic Commerce Transaction Records Using XML

In the race to transform the World Wide Web from a medium for information presentation to a medium for information exchange, the development of practices for ensuring the security, auditability, and non-repudiation of transactions that are well established in the paper-based world has not kept pace in the digital world. Existing Internet technology provides no easy way to create a valid ‘digital receipt’ that meets the requirements of both complex distributed networks and the business community. In addition, an improved articulation of digital signatures is needed. Extensible Forms Description Language (XFDL), developed by UWI.Com and Tim Bray, is an application of XML that allows organizations to move their paper-based forms systems to the Internet while maintaining the necessary attributes of paper-based transaction records. XFDL was designed for implementation in business-to-business electronic commerce and intra-organizational information transactions.  1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.