XML For Beginners

What is XML? XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language, which became a W3C Recommendation on 10. February 1998. XML is a markup language which is like HTML. XML and HTML both use tags. But there are some differences between them:

• HTML was designed for how to display data. And XML was designed for how to store data.
• HTML tags are predefined (for example "<p>", "<table>", etc.). But XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags

Before you learn XML, you should have a basic understanding of HTML.

XML can be used to simplify data storage and sharing. With XML, data is separated from HTML. So you can create HTML layouts for displaying data. When the data changes, you don't have to recreate your HTML file. With XML, data can also be easily exchanged between computer and database systems, even they are incompatible in any other ways. Because XML data is stored in text format, this makes it easier to export data from a system to an XML file, and then import it into another system.