Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

XML and Data

In broad terms, there are really two applications for XML: documents and data. The difference between the two is not always cut and dried, but in general, documents fall along the lines of traditional documents: books, articles, journals, and so on. Data applications of XML encompass a wide variety of uses, such as storing data for application configuration files, inventory information, or any other application where you might have traditionally used a database to store that information.

Although we always talk about XML in terms of “documents,” those “documents” might reflect the content of an actual document, or they might reflect a more data-centric content model. Because of this range of applications for XML, there are tools ...