The reasons for using XML typically are as diverse as the different forms of data that exist in today's world. We will, therefore, not consider specific benefits for certain vertical markets - such as engineering, e-commerce, mathematics, or others - but will instead try to focus on several individual properties of XML that are of universal advantage to all applications.
| XML is easily readable by both humans and machines
| | Until now, most formats for storing data were either suitable for interpretation by software programs (e.g. dBase, GIF, etc.), or readable for humans (such as text or CSV files) - but not both. Since XML defines a set of rules that make interpretation by a computer system very simple it satisfies both needs, because it is still a text-based format that can be easily manipulated by a human being.
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| | XML is object-oriented
| | While the relational data model is very successful for processing large amounts of table-like data, it doesn't lend itself as easily for manipulation of other kinds of data, such as hypertext (i.e. text plus hyperlinks), multimedia, graphics, mathematical or chemical formulas, and all sorts of hierarchical information. In contrast, XML is more object-oriented in the sense of being suitable for describing objects of the real world or any abstract problem domain by modelling their properties as they are, instead of enforcing a normalized decomposition into various tables linked by relations. This makes XML documents more inuitively understandable and thereby reduces both the time required to design and implement computing systems based on XML.
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| | XML is being widely adopted by the computer industry
| | One key factor in the success of the Internet was the wide adoption of the TCP/IP protocol suite by many corporations, which resulted in huge sales volumes and consequently ever decreasing prices for all network components used. As XML is also already widely accepted and implemented by all vendors, this will result in higher volumes and lower prices for software components. Incidentially, this is also, why XML's predecessor, SGML, was never successful on such a broad scale with software products priced in the ten-thousand dollar range, whereas XML products even today are typically priced in hundreds of dollars instead.
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| | XML is global
| | If you want to better understand the huge attention that XML has received, it might be useful to remember another widely-adopted data standard that everybody takes for granted today: ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, was defined in ### year ### and has considerably shaped the evolution of computing itself. While it was restricted to a certain alphabet and writing system (thereby pretty much ignoring the entire rest of the planet) it was still crucial in allowing different computer types and operating systems to freely exchange data. With the adoption of Unicode 1.0 in ### year ### and its continuing evolution up to the current 3.5 version, the idea of ASCII was expanded to encompass all languages and writing systems of the world.
| | Today, it is taken for granted that all computer systems and software products are capable of reading and processing text documents that are based on ASCII or Unicode. XML takes this approach one step further, by building on Unicode (all XML documents are per definition Unicode-based, but may be stored on disk or transmitted over the network in various different "encodings", such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8) and defining a universal way to describe structured data for all different purposes. This is, why some people today call XML the "ASCII of the future".
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Now that we have investigated some of the reasons, why XML makes sense, we will turn to the different pieces of the "Acronym Puzzle" that tends to obscure the view for any newcomer to the field of XML.
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