On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:19 AM, hugo rivera <uai...@gmail.com> wrote: > If you haven't heard of XML yet, you must be living under a rock! - > Programming in the .NET Environment > Taken from the fortunes file. I guess I must be living under a rock, > but I don't know what xml is, or pragmatically, what is it for.
XML is what it looks like: it's a textual markup language like HTML. It's ill-suited for representing data structures (an XML element is an order-dependent collection of anonymous values, while a data structure is an order-independent collection of named values), but that hasn't stopped a very large number of applications from using it as a data structure serialization format. (Just to take one example out of many, Apple's Keynote presentation files are named .key but are actually .zip files containing a (compressed) XML file and supporting media.) Unlike HTML, there is not a fixed set of allowed tag names or attributes. Each program that generates or parses XML is free to pick whatever names it likes; raw XML doesn't even begin to make sense unless you know the meanings assigned to the tags. (This problem is fundamental to any data description, not a flaw in XML, but I mention it so you won't think you need to find the official definition of the semantics of XML.) Russ
