Integrating Flash with Web Applications > Sending and loading variables to and from a remote file > About XML

About XML

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is becoming the standard for the interchange of structured data in Internet applications. You can integrate data in Flash with servers that use XML technology to build sophisticated applications, such as a chat system or a brokerage system.

In XML, as with HTML, you can use tags to markup, or specify, a body of text. In HTML, you can use predefined tags to indicate how text should appear in a Web browser (for example, the <b> tag indicates that text should be bold). In XML, you define tags that identify the type of a piece of data (for example, <password>VerySecret</password>). XML separates the structure of the information from the way it's displayed. This allows the same XML document to be used and reused in different environments.

Every XML tag is called a node, or an element. Each node has a type (1-XML element, or 3-text node) and elements may also have attributes. A node nested in a node is called a child or a childNode. This hierarchical tree structure of nodes is called the XML DOM (Document Object Model)—much like the JavaScript DOM, which is the structure of elements in a Web browser.

In the following example, <PORTFOLIO> is the parent node; it has no attributes and contains the childNode <HOLDING>, which has the attributes SYMBOL, QTY, PRICE, and VALUE:

<PORTFOLIO>
	<HOLDING SYMBOL="RICH"
		QTY="75"
		PRICE="245.50"
		VALUE="18412.50" />
</PORTFOLIO>