Chapter 1. XML for Data

XML was designed to be "SGML for the Web." It was meant for the same sorts of narrative documents SGML and HTML had been used for previously: articles, books, short stories, poems, technical manuals, web pages, and so forth. Much to its inventors' surprise, XML achieved its first great successes not in the writing and publishing arena as intended, but rather in the much more prosaic world of data formats. XML was enthusiastically adopted by programmers who needed a robust, extensible, standard format for data. For the most part, this was not narrative data like stories and articles, but rather record-oriented data such as found in databases. Uses included object serialization, financial records, vector graphics, remote procedure calls, and similar tasks. This chapter explores some of the flaws in traditional formats for such data and elucidates the features of XML that make it surprisingly well suited for such tasks .