c.02, section 1.
XML -- An Introduction
XML is similar to the
language of today's Web pages,
HTML.
Both
XML
and HTML contain markup symbols to describe the contents
of a page or file.
HTML,
however,
describes the content of a Web page (mainly text and graphic images) only in
terms of how it is to be displayed and interacted with. For example,
a <P> starts a new paragraph.
XML describes
the content in terms of what data is being described. For example,
a <PHONENUM> could indicate that the data
that followed it was a phone number. This means that an XML
file can be processed purely as data by a program
or it can be stored with similar data on another computer or,
like an HTML file,
that it can be displayed.
XML is "extensible" because,
unlike HTML,
the markup symbols are unlimited and self-defining.
XML is
actually a simpler and easier-to-use
subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML),
the standard for how to create a document structure.
It is expected that HTML and XML will be used together in
many Web applications.
This talk will give an introduction into XML.
Colloquia Series page.