Introduction to  XML - DTD

1. Introduction to XML
   XML is a cross-platform, software and hardware independent tool for transmitting information? XML is a W3C Recommendations. It stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is a markup language much like HTML used to describe data. In XML, tags are not predefined. A user defines his own tags and XML document structure like Document Type Definition (DTD), XML Schema to describe the data. Hence it is self-descriptive too. There is nothing special about XML It is just plain text with the addition of some XML tags enclosed in angle brackets. In a simple text editor, the XML document is easily visible.
     
2. Reasons of using XML
   There are number of reasons that contributes to the XML?s increasing acceptance, few of them are:
   • Plain Text
     In XML it is easy to create and edit files with anything from a standard text editor to a visual development environment. XML also provides scalability for anything from small configuration files to a company-wide data repository.
   • Data Identification
     The markup tags in XML documents identifiy the information and break up the data into parts for example.. a search program can look for messages sent to particular people from the rest of the message. Different parts of the information are identified and further they can
     be used in different ways by different applications.
     

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