XML Benefits

XML technology has quickly gained favor as a universal data interchange format for networked systems. Among its practical benefits are:

Structure - to model data to any level of complexity
Extensibility - to define new tags as needed
Validation - to check data for structural correctness
Media independence - to publish content in multiple formats
Vendor and platform independence - to process any conforming document using standard commercial software or even simple text tools
Domain-specific vocabularies

XML is used to create new tags that all browsers with XML parsers can understand (e.g., mathematical, chemical, and music markup languages). XML vocabularies provide a standard way for doctors to send prescriptions to pharmacists, for electronic transactions to be transmitted, etc.). Any XML-aware application can extract exactly the info it needs (e.g., it can distinguish between instances of <AUTHOR>Paul McCartney</AUTHOR>and <BEATLES>Paul McCartney</BEATLES>).

XML and HTML can be combined, with each performing the portion of the task that it does best (e.g., XML data can be used to populate HTML forms or tables).

No prior knowledge of the sender application is necessary because the syntax of an XML document instance describes the relationships among the various elements (either explicitly via a DTD or XML schema, or implicitly by means of element context).

Data about data ('metadata') can be used to describe web sites, to describe a collection of related pages, or to 'push' structured content channels to subscribers' desktops.

XML is good not only for transmission of data from server to browser. It is also ideal for passing data from application to application and from machine to machine. Since XML is database-neutral, it is likely that it will play a major role in connecting heterogeneous databases. In a three-tier architecture, XML can be used in the middle tier to integrate data from various back-end databases.

With XML embedded in HTML pages, only changed elements need to be downloaded. The client updates without refreshing the entire page (in some cases); data can be cached in the client. XML enables client-side data manipulation. The user selects one, several, or all records, sorts by different attributes, switches to graphical view, etc. without requesting data from the server each time.

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