Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes

Modeling Data As XML

Earlier chapters in this book described XML mostly in terms of a set of syntax rules that define how sequences of characters are to be used so that an XML processor can process an XML document without throwing errors and that also define the physical structure, expressed as entities. But XML documents also have a logical structure that is expressed by the nesting of elements and the presence of attributes on selected elements. This highly flexible document structure means that you can model many types of data. This is useful for modeling both highly regular structured data that might otherwise be stored in a relational database and highly flexible narrative documents.

First, let’s look at issues relating to markup languages ...