What Is XML Capable Of?

So, XML is not limited to a predefined set of tags as HTML is, but allows the creation of customized tags. The advantages of using XML could loosely be stated as follows :

• Flexibility with data:  Any information can be placed into an XML page. The XML page becomes the data rather than the definitional container for data, as shown in Figure 1-1.

• Web page integration:  This becomes easier because building those web pages becomes more generic. Web pages are data driven (based on content in the web page) rather than relying on the definition of the tags (programming languagedriven) and where the tags are placed.

• Open standards:  XML is completely flexible. No single software company can control and define what tags are created, what each tag means, and where in a document tags should appear. XML is a little like a completely generic programming language.

• Enhanced scalability and compression:  When sending web pages over the Internet, XML pages can contain just data. All the coded programming tags required for HTML are not needed.

• Irrelevant order of data:  The order in which data appears in an XML page is unimportant because it is data. Data can have things applied to it at the client site (in a browser) to change it, if you use something like eXtensible Style Sheets (XSL).