I hate paper – it seems mad that in 2005 there aren't more, readily available, solutions for small businesses to get rid of paperwork.
In 98 before XML took off I had a stab at mapping existing EDI meta-standards to have a forms that create HTML forms for things such as purchase orders etc. See EDML
Although you could argue that any online transaction is a form of EDI, existing efforts to migrate to XML have been slow.
Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from RSS – a trivial standard that the people working on large scale syndication standards such as ICE, used to scoff at.
Perhaps EDI needs an RSS equivalent , something that handles just purchase orders and invoices, for example (which account for the majority of EDI messages), maps to existing standards such as EDIFACT and ANSI X12 (does not re-invent the wheel), and keeps things simple – Really Simple EDI.
After all, web based EDI is actually architecturally simpler than private network solutions – the message and security are separate, and you have companies like Vordel that seem to be focusing on the envelope portion.
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