Introduction to XML technology

To get the most out of XML, you have to know a little bit about it first. XML came from the web. It's a web-based language. But today it's being used everywhere. It's still being used on the web, it's used in print, and it can even be used on your cell phone. XML is very closely related to HTML. If you're familiar with editing HTML, you already have a good set of skills for editing XML. The development on XML started in 1993, as a direct answer to the limitations people saw in HTML. HTML was developed to display text on the screen and it does a pretty good job of this.

But it doesn't know how to deal with data. So work was begun in 1993 to develop a new language called XML. It was finished by 1998 and adopted. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. The keyword here is extensible. Unlike HTML, which has almost 100 predefined tags, XML has very few predefined tags. The key part of the technology is that you write your own. Just like HTML, XML is plain text, which means you can edit it in any text editor, such as Notepad, TextEdit, BBEdit and even Dreamweaver.

If you use Microsoft Word, be sure that you save it as a plain text file. Whatever you do, don't use the native Word XML format. It's unusable in any of the XML workflows we are going to discuss here. XML is non-proprietary, which means no one owns it, there is no licensing, and best of all, it's free.