Why is xml important

When a company sells a good or service to another company, a great deal of information needs to be exchanged—about prices, terms, specifications, delivery schedules, and so on. With XML, all the necessary information can be shared electronically, allowing complex deals to be closed without any human intervention.

In the not-too-distant future, your company may be judged by the content of its XML tags. But if individual companies create their own tags, how will they share information with one another? Without a standardized syntax, one company may create unique tags that are unrecognizable to its suppliers and buyers. To reduce that danger, many XML dictionaries are being created in fields like finance, mathematics, chemicals, and e-commerce.

Embedded in XML, these dictionaries standardize tag definitions. As a core standard, XML provides a solid foundation around which other standards may grow. XML is, after, a meta-language, a set of rules that can be used to create sets of rules for documents. In a certain sense, there's no such thing as an 'XML document' - all the documents that use XML-compliant syntax are really using applications of XML, with tag sets chosen by their creators for that particular document.

XML's facilities for creating DTDs give standard-builders a set of tools for specifying what document structures may or must appear in a document, making it easy to define sets of structures.

These structures can then be used with XML tools for authoring, parsing, and processing, and used by applications as a guide to the data they should accept. At the same time that XML is being used to create other standards, other supporting standards for XML are being defined.

W3C working groups are developing additional supporting standards for XML. XPointers, derived from the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI extended pointers, provide a way to consistently reference portions of documents. Other standards, including support for data-typing, are under discussion. XML can be used on a wide variety of platforms and interpreted with a wide variety of tools. Because the document structures behave consistently, parsers that interpret them can be built at relatively low cost in any of a number of languages.

XML supports a number of key standards for character encoding, allowing it to be used all over the world in a number of different computing environments. XML complements Java, another force for interoperability, very well, and a considerable amount of early XML development has been in Java. XML parser development so far has focused on freeware plug-ins that provide parsing capabilities to XML applications, greatly lowering the cost of building XML-enabled applications.

Although there have been some questions about the process used to create XML, the standard itself is completely open, freely available on the web. The W3C members have early access to standards and, apart from invited experts, are the only ones who can participate directly in their creation , but once the standard is complete the results are public.

The XML Working Group and the Working Groups for the supporting standards also release drafts of their work on a regular basis, making it possible to follow work in progress.

XML documents themselves are also considerably more open than their binary counterparts. While companies may still create XML that behaves in a specific way bound to their application, the data in the XML document is available to any application.

While developers could create obfuscated DTDs or encrypt their data in a proprietary manner, they would lose most of the benefits of using XML.

XML doesn't bar the creation of proprietary formats, but its openness is one of its greatest advantages. Application developers can partition tasks among multiple tools, possibly even from different vendors, allowing them all to operate on the same structured data set.

Successful application of XML will require data modeling expertise and eventually the building of a new set of tools. Get certified by completing a course today!

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