XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is meta-language used to describe other technologies, which helps you to design text formats that let you structure your data. XML makes it easy for a computer to generate data, read data, and ensure that the data structure is unambiguous and simplifies business-to-business transactions on the web.

It is a World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org) standard that lets you create your own tags.

HTML tags describe how something should render. They don't contain any information about data, they only describe how it should look. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

<p><b>Infomosaic Corporation</b>
<br> 111 N.Market Street<br>
San Jose, CA, 95113</p)

Figure 2 shows the XML form of previous example shown on Figure 1. Although the tags are different, they can still be rendered just like HTML.

<address>
<name>
<company-name>Infomosaic Corporation</company-name>
</name>
<street>111 N.Market Street</street>
<city>San Jose</city>
<state>CA</state>
<zipcode>95113</zipcode>
………
</address>

Advantages of XML

XML makes it easier for two computers to exchange data with each other. Your data is described using tags that describe what each piece of data is. XML doesn't replace HTML, though; they're designed for different purposes. XML is the Web's language for data interchange and HTML is the Web's language for rendering.

XML Provides the Following:

1. Ability to do data interchange: XML makes it easy to send structured data across the web so that nothing gets lost in translation.
2. Enable B2B Communication: Do not need to write the code to exchange data.
3. Enable smart searches