Extensible Markup Language (XML) lets you define and store data in a shareable manner. XML supports information exchange between computer systems such as websites, databases, and third-party applications. Predefined rules make it easy to transmit data as XML files over any network because the recipient can use those rules to read the data accurately and efficiently.
Why is XML Important?
XML is a markup language that provides rules to define any data. Unlike other programming languages, XML cannot perform computing operations by itself. Instead, any programming language or software can be implemented for structured data management.
For example, consider a text document with comments on it. The comments might give suggestions like these:
- Make the title bold
- This sentence is a header
- This word is the author
Such comments improve the document’s usability without affecting its content. Similarly, XML uses markup symbols to provide more information about any data. Other software, like browsers and data processing applications, use this information to process structured data more efficiently
Understanding the Basics
XML is a markup language. That means it’s a text document with symbols that control how it’s structured and formatted. It contains text that can be displayed or processed, and text that determines what to do with that data.
A traditional data file contains a run-on of numbers, letters and special characters. There’s no way to use the file itself to determine where one value ends and the next begins. An XML document tells you what its data stands for.
What is XML Used For?
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XML’s main objective is to create a “simple text-based format for representing structured information”. The most common application of XML is to:
- Simplify the creation of HTML documents for a large website.
- Exchange the information between organisations and systems.
- Unload and reload the databases.
- Store and arrange the data to customise your data handling needs.
- Merge with style sheets to create almost any desired output.
Pros and Cons of XML
Like any other coding language, XML also comes with its own share of pros and cons; here are some important ones.
Pros:
- It is a platform-independent language, so users can run it on any system regardless of the operating system type.
- Because it employs human vocabulary rather than sophisticated technical jargon, it is simple to read and comprehend.
- Unicode is an international encoding standard for compatibility with various languages and scripts in which each letter, digit, or symbol is allocated a unique numeric value that is applicable across platforms and software.
- XML and Java are pretty compatible.
- It uses DTD and schema validation to verify that the XML document is void of errors.
- Thanks to its cross-platform nature, the XML codes do not need any conversion and can be easily shared between various systems.
Cons:
- The syntax is overly complicated and redundant.
- The syntax consumes too much storage space due to its redundancy.
- Arrays are not supported.
- Despite its use as a backend language, it lacks rendering instructions.
- Since no browser understands it, programmers must first translate it to HTML code.
