Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours

The Self-Documenting Aspects of XML

One enormous advantage of using XML to define the structure of data should be obvious—using tag names of your own creation makes XML files largely self-documenting. Even someone who knows nothing at all about XML can look at the file and make a reasonable guess about what it represents.

This is in sharp contrast to many descriptions of data found in databases, where there's a much steeper learning curve. It also provides a degree of consistency with HTML, the language of the Web. If you have a basic knowledge of markup tags in HTML, you already know a lot about XML.

When you set out to build a database, first you need to describe the form the data takes. Data can be expressed in the form of a hierarchical ...