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XML Application Development
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
What is XML?XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information. A markup language is a mechanism to identify structures in a document. The XML specification defines a standard way to add markup to documents.
XML is Just like HTML?
No. In HTML, both the tag semantics and the tag set are fixed. XML specifies neither semantics nor a tag set. XML is really a meta-language for describing markup languages. XML document will either be defined by the applications that process them or by style sheets.
Is XML similar to SGML?
No, XML is defined as an application profile of SGML. SGML is the Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML has been the standard, but it is not well suited to serving documents over the web, Defining XML as an application profile of SGML. Using and understanding XML documents does not require a system that is capable of understanding the full generality of SGML.
Why XML?
In order to appreciate XML, it is important to understand why it was created. XML was created so that richly structured documents could be used over the web.
XML Development Features:
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It shall be straightforward to use XML over the Internet. Users must be able to view XML documents as quickly and easily as HTML documents. |
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XML shall support a wide variety of applications. |
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XML shall be compatible with SGML. |
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It shall be easy to write programs that process XML documents. |
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The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to an absolute minimum, ideally zero. |
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XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear. |
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XThe XML design should be prepared quickly. Standards efforts are notoriously slow. XML was needed immediately and was developed as quickly as possible. |
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The design of XML shall be formal and concise. |
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One of the greatest strengths of XML is that it allows you to create your own tag names. |
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XML content can be processed without a document type declaration. However, there are some instances where the declaration is required:
Authoring Environments
Default Attribute Values
White Space Handling |
XML is already a standard for data interchange, so you may need to pass your data on to others as XML or take XML as input. There are advantages over competing technologies such as EDI.
XML is easy to convert further into different formats as required: e.g. HTML, PDF, and plain text.
In Web applications, XML can theoretically be used to reduce server hits and load on the server for sorts etc, because some processing can be done by the client browser.
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