Yah, sure I know what XML is! I think.

O.K. I’m actually not sure, except that it stands for eXtensible Markup Language. So, the article that I read, about XHTML, was actually contributed by Dev Articles. So I decided to check out there site and found this article on “XML Basics” contributed by Mamun Zaman, who says that he first thought xml was something like html, but that xml is used to “describe date” and html is used to “display data”. The writer states

“An XML document does not do anything by itself. It is just pure information wrapped in tags. You have to write a piece of software to send, receive or display it.”

Now, here’s the clear difference html tags are “predefined” but with xml you can create your own tags that would apply to your data. And the article gives and example using books. It was hard for me to comprehend tags like <bookstore></bookstore> and <title></title> having only recognized tags in html, beforehand.

What defines these tags, since they do not stand alone. Part of the answer is DTDs. Read my next post as I unravel the mystery.

~ by kerricummins on January 26, 2008.