Motivating XML
If you're reading this book, you're a developer. (At least I hope you are. Otherwise a lot of what I say isn't going to make any sense :-) ) Doubtless over the course of your career you've written numerous programs that read and write files. And every time you wrote a new program you had to invent or learn a new file format. File formats I personally have had to deal with over the years include RTF, Word .doc files, tab delimited text, FITS, PDF, PostScript, and many more. You've probably encountered a few of these yourself. Doubtless, you've also seen many other formats.
If you're like me, you've learned to dread encountering a new file format. If the format is documented at all, the documentation is likely incomplete or, worse ...
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