Appendix A: Related Standards

Appendix A

XML, in many respects, is about standards, or the creation thereof. Even if you're just creating a schema for your own purposes, you're going down the path of creating a language to standardize your approach to something—to standardize your means of describing data and perhaps transmitting it to others.

XML has given individuals, companies large and small, and entire industries the ability to define the common grounds on which they describe and exchange data. And while XML was the driving force behind the ability to do this, like today's alphabet, it wasn't until people created languages and applications to use XML before it's abilities became exposed.

Today many of the standards created either build upon or utilize others. For instance, you might have a DTD document that is transported as a "payload" within the Microsoft BizTalk Framework. In this appendix we will discuss some of these related standards and how they pertain to XML. Because these efforts are often intertwined, this should be extremely useful in understanding what is out there, what XML is used for, and how you might tap it instead of writing your own solution.