Introduction | XML Data Setup | XSL and XSLT | XPath | Conclusion

Conclusion:

Why XML?

Simplicity, Flexibility
It is an axiom that you can't have both simplicity and flexibility. If it's simple, it's because constraints have been put on what you can do with it. Fewer options, more simplicity. If it's flexible, it's because you've been willing to put in the time to learn how the options work.

Extreme Flexibility
SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language, is an extremely powerful, flexible meta-language developed around 1960-1980. Although notoriously difficult to use, many large applications were built using SGML. Development of new applications using SGML has slowed, but it remains a well-established standard which remains the foundation of important government and big-industry systems.

Extreme Simplicity
Using SGML-like syntax, Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML around 1990 as an extremely simplified way for the polyglot scientists at CERN in Switzerland to exchange information on the particle physics research they were doing. It caught on. The combination of HTML, improved browsers, and search engines brought an explosion of global research and commercial activity. In just ten years, this initiative developed into "The Web" as we know it.

Enter XML
Now that HTML has given us a taste of the tagged life, we seem to be ready to move towards more flexibility. XML is not so much an improved version of HTML, though it may supplant it, as it is a more orderly form of SGML.

The US Government and many large industries have an interest in finding a way to leverage their heavy investment in SGML documents by making them web-accessible. XML makes it possible to do that in a simpler, more cost-effective way.

Other industries as well are finding XML an affordable alternative to proprietary data exchange methods and are hard at work standardizing the tags that will make it easier for systems to communicate.

Click here to view a fairly random list of XML meta languages that have been proposed.

 

 

==>The End