Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours

The Impact of XML

Although email and other text messages are important and make up a significant fraction of the traffic on the Internet, it's the ability to easily and accurately transfer complex forms of data that is making the biggest impact on the growth of the Web. To conduct commerce on the Web, it must be possible to store, retrieve, and process information such as customer profiles and records of purchases on specific visits to a site. XML is an effective metalanguage for describing complex data objects, for two reasons. As stated earlier, the flexibility of creating your own tags makes XML documents largely self- documenting. Furthermore, the way that XML documents are constructed fits in well with our intuitive notions of hierarchies ...