Datasheet

❑ XML files are human-readable. XML was designed as text so that, in the worst case, someone
can always read it to figure out the content. Such is not the case with binary data formats.
❑ Widespread industry support exists for XML. Numerous tools and utilities are being provided
with Web browsers, databases, and operating systems, making it easier and less expensive for
small and medium-sized organizations to import and export data in XML format. For example,
the .NET Framework has XML support available everywhere in the framework enabling the
developers to easily and effectively utilize the power of the XML.
❑ Major relational databases such as SQL Server 20005 have the native capability to store, read
and generate XML data.
❑ A large family of XML support technologies is available for the interpretation and transformation
of XML data for Web page display and report generation.
Summary
Much more can certainly be written about XML and a number of books have done just that. This chapter
just scratched the surface of XML by providing an overview of XML, highlighting important features
related to XML. This chapter also discussed the related XML technologies used later in this book. To
summarize this chapter:
❑ XML is extensible. It provides a specification for creating your own tags. XML is a metamarkup
language.
❑ To be well formed, XML must essentially conform syntactically to the W3C specification, and all
elements within the document must be children of one and only one document element.
❑ You have the ability to create your own tags, so make them meaningful. Because XML doesn’t
define any tags, creating tags that make sense to other developers is crucial.
❑ Namespaces provide a way to group elements and attributes into one vocabulary using a unique
name. Using the xmlns attribute, a namespace prefix is bound to a unique namespace name.
❑ XML schemas offer developers a rich language to describe and define the structure, cardinality,
datatypes, and overall content of their XML documents.
❑ Two object models exist for processing the content in any XML document: the DOM and SAX.
The DOM allows random access and the capability to modify, delete, and replace nodes in the
XML hierarchy. SAX provides a simple, efficient way to process large XML documents.
❑ XSLT provides a way to transform an XML document to another format such as HTML or
another type of XML.
❑ XPath is a language that permits you to address the parts of an XML document.
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