XML - Basics

                                 XML - Basics

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The design goals of XML focus on simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services.

XML stands for extensible Markup Language

XML is a markup language like HTML

XML is designed to store and transport data

XML is designed to be self-descriptive

Differences between XML and HTML

XML and HTML were designed with different goals:

XML is designed to carry data emphasizing on what type of data it is.

HTML is designed to display data emphasizing on how data looks

XML tags are not predefined like HTML tags.

HTML is a markup language whereas XML provides a framework for defining markup languages.

HTML is about displaying data,hence it is static whereas XML is about carrying information,which makes it dynamic.

XML makes web development User Friendly : Many computer systems contain data in incompatible formats. Exchanging data between incompatible systems or upgraded systems is a time-consuming task for web developers. Large amounts of data must be converted, and incompatible data is often lost. XML stores data in plain text format. This provides a software- and hardware-independent way of storing, transporting, and sharing data.

XML is Extensible: XML applications will work as expected even if data is edited i.e. added or removed