A Look Into The Positives And Negatives Of Xml
XML stands for Extensible Mark-up Language and its a mark-up language just for carrying as well as exhibiting data or data over the internet, in a regular and as meant fashion no matter the systems or browsers being used. As a result XML is totally system independent and it is accessible freely.
XML was really designed to precede SGML and HTML, both of which also are mark-up languages but had their very own boundaries and also constraints. For example, SGML was in fact incredibly intricate and overpriced, this made it hard to make use of for the web, in particular because it was not being maintained by any of the commercial browsers.
Regarding HTML, in spite of being free and extensively supported, it had a number of key faults making it unsuitable for use carrying data over the internet.
Thus XML appeared out of SGML by a team of IT specialists from IBM and Sun, who took the best parts of SGML and cut out the unused, complex and awkward parts. The result was a simple, extensible and open specification that's only 26 pages long, as compared to in excess of 500 pages that the SGML specification came with.
Consequently that"s the essential history v XML, let"s now have a quick look at what precisely XML is along with what it looks like.
In relation to its code syntax, XML is similar to HTML, i.e. you have an opening tag that looks like , and a closing tag that looks like
Aside from the opening and closing tags, the rest of an xml file is simply pairs of opening and closing tags with data (collectively, the tags and data are known as XML Elements).
Having given a quick history on XML and having a glimpse at just what it looks like, lets now plunge straight to the pros and cons, starting of course with the pros.
The first and most clear advantages is the fact in contrast to HTML, XML tags have no semantic meaning; which means that you"re not tied in to using limited tags, one example is, in HTML you have to use the body tag to position your body elements or the head tag to place the head elements.
With XML you actually design your own tags to suit your needs and you may position whatever you like in between your tags, there aren't any constraints inside the rules e.g. with HTML only body elements should go within the body tag.
The other advantage would be that as well as tags, you can also create as well as publish your own rules, and these rules, as opposed to HTML, don't restricted to formatting rules, XML lets you define all types of tags with all types of rules, such as tags representing business rules or tags representing data description or data relationships.
Regardless of the many benefits, there is also one major drawback which has prevented XML being more substantially used than it is at present, which would be the absence of suitable processing programs.
With HTML for example, you can actually use virtually any web browser to read any HTML document this is not the case with XML, because there are at the moment no XML browsers available. Therefore XML documents need to be changed to HTML before you distribute them or even to employ a middleware program to convert it on the fly.
That being said, parsing tools and algorithms are constantly growing plus new developments are making it simpler than you ever have to work with XML, and thus lots of people are experiencing the benefits to switching their data to XML.
XML was really designed to precede SGML and HTML, both of which also are mark-up languages but had their very own boundaries and also constraints. For example, SGML was in fact incredibly intricate and overpriced, this made it hard to make use of for the web, in particular because it was not being maintained by any of the commercial browsers.
Regarding HTML, in spite of being free and extensively supported, it had a number of key faults making it unsuitable for use carrying data over the internet.
Thus XML appeared out of SGML by a team of IT specialists from IBM and Sun, who took the best parts of SGML and cut out the unused, complex and awkward parts. The result was a simple, extensible and open specification that's only 26 pages long, as compared to in excess of 500 pages that the SGML specification came with.
Consequently that"s the essential history v XML, let"s now have a quick look at what precisely XML is along with what it looks like.
In relation to its code syntax, XML is similar to HTML, i.e. you have an opening tag that looks like , and a closing tag that looks like
Aside from the opening and closing tags, the rest of an xml file is simply pairs of opening and closing tags with data (collectively, the tags and data are known as XML Elements).
Having given a quick history on XML and having a glimpse at just what it looks like, lets now plunge straight to the pros and cons, starting of course with the pros.
The first and most clear advantages is the fact in contrast to HTML, XML tags have no semantic meaning; which means that you"re not tied in to using limited tags, one example is, in HTML you have to use the body tag to position your body elements or the head tag to place the head elements.
With XML you actually design your own tags to suit your needs and you may position whatever you like in between your tags, there aren't any constraints inside the rules e.g. with HTML only body elements should go within the body tag.
The other advantage would be that as well as tags, you can also create as well as publish your own rules, and these rules, as opposed to HTML, don't restricted to formatting rules, XML lets you define all types of tags with all types of rules, such as tags representing business rules or tags representing data description or data relationships.
Regardless of the many benefits, there is also one major drawback which has prevented XML being more substantially used than it is at present, which would be the absence of suitable processing programs.
With HTML for example, you can actually use virtually any web browser to read any HTML document this is not the case with XML, because there are at the moment no XML browsers available. Therefore XML documents need to be changed to HTML before you distribute them or even to employ a middleware program to convert it on the fly.
That being said, parsing tools and algorithms are constantly growing plus new developments are making it simpler than you ever have to work with XML, and thus lots of people are experiencing the benefits to switching their data to XML.