Internet Marketing Tips

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is an extensible, artificial language that uses text annotations for its structure base. An extensible language is one which allows its users to define their own elements, being that it contains no predefined tags. This language was created to transport and store data, not display data functions as with HTML. In short, XML is a metalanguage being that is a language to describe other languages. XML has dual functions of encoding documents and serializing data.

According to XML.silmaril.ie, the main functions of XML are:

• Information identification
• Information storage
• Information structure
• Publishing
• Messaging and data transfer
• Web services

Basically, XML describes content within a tag without the intention of displaying what you decide to name that particular tag. An example of an XML tag would be the following: <movie>your favorite movie</movie>. In its simplest form, XML is a self descriptive tag. According to Wikipedia.org, here are the advantages and disadvantages of XML:

Advantages of XML

• It is text-based.
• It supports Unicode, allowing almost any information in any written human language to be communicated.
• It can represent common computer science data structures: records, lists and trees.
• Its self-documenting format describes structure and field names as well as specific values.
• The strict syntax and parsing requirements make the necessary parsing algorithms extremely simple, efficient, and consistent.
• XML is heavily used as a format for document storage and processing, both online and offline.
• It is based on international standards.
• It can be updated incrementally.
• It allows validation using schema languages such as XSD and Schematron, which makes effective unit-testing, firewalls, acceptance testing, contractual specification and software construction easier.
• The hierarchical structure is suitable for most (but not all) types of documents.
• It is platform-independent, thus relatively immune to changes in technology.
• Forward and backward compatibility are relatively easy to maintain despite changes in DTD or Schema.
• Its predecessor, SGML, has been in use since 1986, so there is extensive experience and software available.

Disadvantages of XML

• XML syntax is redundant or large relative to binary representations of similar data, especially with tabular data.
• The redundancy may affect application efficiency through higher storage, transmission and processing costs.
• XML syntax is verbose, especially for human readers, relative to other alternative “text-based” data transmission formats.
• The hierarchical model for representation is limited in comparison to an object oriented graph.
• Expressing overlapping (non-hierarchical) node relationships requires extra effort.
• XML namespaces are problematic to use and namespace support can be difficult to correctly implement in an XML parser.
• XML is commonly depicted as “self-documenting” but this depiction ignores critical ambiguities.
• The distinction between content and attributes in XML seems unnatural to some and makes designing XML data structures harder.

Get started utilizing XML with this free tutorial.