XML-Based Servers- Communicating meaningful information over the Web using XML

XML-Based Servers- Communicating meaningful information over the Web using XML

Abstract 

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the latest buzzword on the Internet, but it is also a rapidly growing and maturing technology with real world applications, particularly for management, display, and the organization of data. It is primarily a technology concerned with the description and structuring of data.
  The idea of a universal data format is not new. An early attempt to combine a universally acceptable data format with rich information storage capabilities was SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). The best known application of SGML is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). The idea was that any HTML document (or web page) would be presentable in any application that was capable of understanding HTML (termed the Web Browser).
   Unfortunately, SGML is such a complicated language that it is not well suited to data interchange over the Web. HTML too is limited in its scope, in that it is intended for displaying documents in a browser only. Thus to adapt SGML to provide facilities to describe some kinds of specialized information, XML was developed. Thus XML is actually a subset of SGML and fully compatible with it.
  It is important to note however that XML is not really a language at all, but a standard for creating languages that meet the XML criteria. It thus describes a syntax that you would use to create your own languages. XML can be viewed in an IE5 web browser since IE5 contains a default built in style sheet that enables us to view XML documents in a web browser.
 XML is very flexible. Hence it is targeted to be the basis for defining data exchange languages, especially for communication over the Internet. It makes it very easy to work with data within applications but it also makes it easy to share this information with others.  The coming chapters will highlight some factors about the use of XML in real world applications, as well as the reason why it is becoming the lingua franca for database applications.