Presenting XML to Clients

XML is a useful way of exchanging data between applications and for moving and storing data within an application. However, XML is not very convenient for presenting data to a user because it primarily describes the content of the data and not how to present it to the user.

Data presented to a user must be formatted so that it is easy to read. XML defines the data and its metadata, but it does not define how to format the data for presentation. In fact, one of the design criteria of XML is not to define data presentation formats. Because the same data will be presented in different ways to different users, any attempt to include presentation information would turn the XML document into an incoherent mix of data, metadata, ...

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