Real World XML

Infosets

While discussing creating XML documents, it's worth discussing another XML specification: the XML Information Set specification, which you'll find at www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset.

XML documents excel at storing data, and this has led developers to wonder if XML will ultimately be able to solve an old problem: being able to directly compare and classify the data in multiple documents. For example, consider the World Wide Web as it stands today: There can be thousands of documents on a particular topic, but how can you possibly compare them? For example, a search for the term XML turns up millions of matches, but it would be extraordinarily difficult to write a program that would compare the data in those documents because all that data isn't ...