XML Simplifies Data Transport and Platform Changes
Data Transport
- With XML, data can easily be exchanged between incompatible systems
- One of the most time-consuming challenges for developers is to exchange data between incompatible systems over the Internet
- Exchanging data as XML greatly reduces this complexity, since the data can be read by different incompatible applications
Platform Changes
- Upgrading to new systems (hardware or software platforms), is always very time consuming
- Large amounts of data must be converted and incompatible data is often lost
- XML data is stored in text format
- This makes it easier to expand or upgrade to new operating systems, new applications, or new browsers, without losing data
XML documents form a tree structure that starts at
"the root" and branches to "the leaves"
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<note>
<to>Raju</to>
<from>Ravi</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
</note>
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
The first line is the XML
declaration. It defines the XML version (1.0) and the encoding used (ISO-8859-1
= Latin-1/West European character set).
<note>
The next line describes the
root element of the document (like saying: "this document is a
note").
<to>Raju</to>
<from>Ravi</from>
<heading>Reminder</heading>
The next 4 lines describe 4 child elements of the root (to,
from, heading, and body).
</note>
The last line defines the end of the root element.
