Datasheet

Figure 1-1: A simple sample HTML page
What Is XML Capable Of?
So, XML is not limited to a predefined set of tags as HTML is, but allows the creation of customized tags.
The advantages of using XML could loosely be stated as follows:
❑ Flexibility with data: Any information can be placed into an XML page. The XML page
becomes the data rather than the definitional container for data, as shown in Figure 1-1.
❑ Web page integration: This becomes easier because building those web pages becomes more
generic. Web pages are data driven (based on content in the web page) rather than relying on
the definition of the tags (programming language–driven) and where the tags are placed.
❑ Open standards: XML is completely flexible. No single software company can control and
define what tags are created, what each tag means, and where in a document tags should
appear. XML is a little like a completely generic programming language.
❑ Enhanced scalability and compression: When sending web pages over the Internet, XML pages
can contain just data. All the coded programming tags required for HTML are not needed.
❑ Irrelevant order of data: The order in which data appears in an XML page is unimportant because
it is data. Data can have things applied to it at the client site (in a browser) to change it, if you
use something like eXtensible Style Sheets (XSL).
What Is XSL?
XSL is a formatting language that applies templating to consistent data repetitions inside XML docu-
ments. For example, an XML page containing a listing of clients and their addresses could be formatted
into a nice looking table field using an XSL style sheet that showed each different client on a single row
in the table, as shown in Figure 1-2.
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What Is XML?
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