What is XML?
by Anthony Francis Cernosek 11/25/2003

XML is the markup language of the future. The W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) has already decided to replace HTML with XML - someday. Modern browsers (Navigator 6.0 and Internet Explorer 5.5 or later) can already display raw XML.

You can use XML to create your own markup language, define its rules ( in a Document Type Definition or DTD, or in a more complex "schema"), and then create tools to process your new markup. But XML's most powerful function is to temporarily store and transfer data.

XML makes data easy to store, transfer, and decipher ( for humans and for computers). XML accomplishes all this with .....
* data field names embedded with the data
* a clear heirarchical data structure
* a single type of encoding - unpacked ASCII

Many large corporations, even entire industries, are already converting their data to XML - especially for transfer between otherwise incompatible programs, computer platforms, and operating systems. XML does not replace databases for long term storage.

XML has no presentation specs( font, size, color), which must be provided by an external file - Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This separation of style and content is intentional, and a determined attempt by the W3C to return to the original purpose of HTML.