BizTalk™ Unleashed

The Fundamentals of XML Technologies

This section covers the fundamentals of XML and how markup technologies will revolutionize the way we build business applications for a long time to come.

XML Background

Let's begin with a short history lesson about where XML began and then discuss where it will take us. A few years back (the late 1960s), some IBM scientists were interested in ways to abstract the data in their documents from their proprietary formatting codes. In other words, they wanted to separate their precious data from the proprietary codes normally dispersed throughout the data in the document. They also wanted a document that could add context to their data—that is, add meaning to the document. More important, they wanted computer ...