Beginning InfoPath™ 2003

3.3. Looking Briefly at XML

One of the exciting things about InfoPath is that under the covers it all comes down to XML (Extensible Markup Language). As mentioned, XML has fast become the de facto standard for transferring and storing data on and off the Web, as well as between various business systems. XML itself is not a terribly confusing file structure, because it is just a bunch of tags.

To quickly examine XML, take a look at a small example called Customers.XML, shown here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<dataroot xmlns:od="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:officedata" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="Customers.xsd" generated="2004-07-30T12:11:47">
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>1</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>Diana Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>2</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>Scott Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>3</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>Chris Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>4</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>Kari Anne Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>5</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>Nichole Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>6</CustomerID>
<CustomerName>David Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
<tblCustomers>
<CustomerID>7</CustomerID>

<CustomerName>Joseph Barker</CustomerName>
</tblCustomers>
</dataroot>

You may have heard of a language used for Web page design called HTML ...