What is XML
Dated: 18 Oct, 2010 02:51:35 AM
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML language was created by W3C (WorldWide Web Consortium) to provide an easy to use and standardized way to store self-describing data (self-describing data is data that describes about its content and its structure). XML is nothing by itself but a text documents containing some text between < and > (angle brackets). XML is more of a “
common ground” standard.
The main benefit of XML is that you can use it to transfer data among programs and the data will describe itself like what are the fields, what are their values, etc. The publisher application will provide its data in XML format which will then be consumed by the subscriber (or consumer) application. These different applications do not need to be on the same platform, they can be on very different platforms. The publisher may be an application running on Windows desktop PC, while the consumer application may be running on some proprietary operating system and is accessible through the internet only.
What makes XML truly powerful is the international acceptance it has received. Many individuals and corporations have put forth hard work to make XML interfaces for databases, programming, office application, mobile phones and more. It is because of this hard work that the tools exist to do these conversions from whatever platform into standardized XML data or convert XML into a format used by the platform.
First Example XML document
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<students>
<student>
<name>Manish Dalal</name>
<course>XML</course>
<duration>60 days</duration>
</student>
<student>
<name>Ajay Sharma</name>
<course>.NET 4.0</course>
<duration>180 days</duration>
</student>
</students>
From the above document, you can easily interpret that this document contains information about two students
- Manish Dalal, who has enrolled for XML course which is a 60 days course.
- Ajay Sharma, who has enrolled in .NET 4.0 course which is a 180 days course.
The structure is also self-descriptive.
- there are students (a list)
- which contain student's details
The
student record xml can be viewed
here
Like this article? Now share it with your friends