XML Uses and Advantage

Uses and Advantages of XML are:

• XML is a meta-markup language that enables the creation of markup languages for particular documents and domains.
• XML tags describe the structure and semantics of a document’s content, not the format of the content. The format is described in a separate style sheet.
• XML documents are created in an editor, read by a Parser, and displayed by a browser.
• XML on the Web rests on the foundations provided by HTML, CSS, and URLs.
• Numerous supporting technologies layer on top of XML, including XSL style sheets, XLinks, and XPointers. These let you do more than you can accomplish with just CSS and URLs.
• XML tags are not pre-defined. You must define your own tags which provide more flexibility.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Syndicated web site updates (news feeds and blog entries, for example)
• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) Distributed application communication.
• WSDL (Web Services Description Language) Web services
• Open Document, Open file format for office applications (word processing, spreadsheet, and so on)

All of these markup languages are for metadata, but SGML and XML may be further considered meta-languages, since they can be used to create other metadata languages.

XML – at a Glance

XML is a Markup Language stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is a simple, very flexible text format derived from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML – ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in management, display, organization and the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. The XML standard was created by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to provide an easy to use and standardized flexible way to create “self-describing data” – that describes both its content and its structure to share information on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere.

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