There is always an extensive demand for exchanging data between different sources without worrying about how the receiver will use it or how it will be displayed. XML does that thing for us. It’s a W3C(World Wide Web Consortium) initiative that allows information to be encoded in meaningful structure and rules that humans and machines can understand easily.
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is not a replacement of HTML.
While HTML is designed with focus on how to ‘display’ data, XML is designed how to ‘store’ and ‘transport’ it.
XML, in itself, does not DO anything.
Let’s look at a sample xml document:
<message>
<to>Tom</to>
<from>Bill</from>
<body>Send me your phone number</body>
</message>
The above XML document contains a message with a body having a sender and receiver information. But it does not do anything on its own. It has just structured and stored information. Someone has to write a software code to receive, send or display it.
The tags like or are not predefined. They are written by the author of this XML document.
XML is ‘extensible’, in this sense. This means it does not have a fixed set of elements (unlike HTML).
Thus, in short, we can say that XML is a software and hardware independent tool or way to structure, store and carry information.
XML Structure
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