Write Once, Read Anywhere

XML has many uses, as we will soon see. But one major strength for XML is that it transcends proprietary data structures across vendors and platforms. XML is platform and language independent, which makes it great for exchanging data between business domains. For example, if we look at a large e-commerce site, such as Amazon.com, and consider that many different products are sold there, we know that Amazon doesn't manufacture and stock all those products. They rely on business relationships with vendors. Amazon receives product information from a vendor's database in the form of an XML document, and because they have an established DTD (XML schema) for these documents, they can display and sell products from many vendors .