Can anyone give me a definition of what XML is in laymen’s terms?
I was asked this recently if I knew what it was in an interview, and I’d like to have an answer for my second interview. The sites I’ve found on the net, though, have mostly been talking above my head. I was just wondering if someone can tell me some basics.
XML is Extensable Markup Language. it’s like HTML for structured documents (spreadsheets, financial transactions, technical drawings, etc.)
for a good 10 point description see: http://www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points
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The key selling point for XML is it can contain data element descriptors. It uses tags to identify data elements, but leaves the use of those data elements to the front-end (browser, middleware app, whatever).
So a web page might say:
<body>
Potatoes are $1.19 per pound.
</body>
An XML-enabled wen page might say:
<body>
Potatoes are <price>1.19</price> per pound.
<body>
This kind of construction allows an application that understands the “price” marker to grab the price and do something with it.
An applicaiton that doesn’t will just ignore it.
XML is being highly touted as a solution to connect different systems. Everything will have an XML interface… so in simplified terms, if I need to take a user list from a mainframe computer and reference it on my new network operating system, then theoretically I plug a XML interpreter into the mainframe, and one into the LAN, and everything works.
We have a client who’s hot-to-trot on being XML compliant, and I just went through a SOW modification to keep them happy…
Or to put it another way… HTML tags are used to specify the way a document looks. XML tags are used to define the structure of the data.
Thanks a lot for the info. It really helps.
From The Economist: Pocket Internet by Sean Geer:
"Extensible Mark-up Language, a way of describing and sharing data on networks. Like its cousin HTML, XML consists of a set of tags that describe a chunk of data…[however] XML is designed to describe the content of a page in terms of the type of data it contains, rather than the way that data should look. So while an HTML tag such as <FONT> simply specifies that the following text should be displayed in a particular size and weight, and XML <FISH> tag might indicate that the following data descibes a particular species of fish.
"This characteristic of XML makes it easy for like-minded groups of people to share information, because they need only agree on a set of tags that meet their particular needs. Thus a global consortium of fishmongers might agree on a standard way of describing information about fish catches - the number landed, the average size of the fish, the different species - and use their own XML tags to actually store the data. An intelligent search engine could then look for data types rather than just words: all the fishmongers who landed haddock of a particular size on a specified date, rather than just any website containing the word haddock.
“…the language’s real importance in the future is in business-to-business e-commerce, where its ability to help companies share information will make the automation of many business processes much easier.”
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