Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

By Steven Holzner

Day 1. Welcome to XML

Welcome to Extensible Markup Language, XML, the language for handling data in compact, easy-to-manage form—not to mention the most powerful advance the Internet has seen for years. The XML world is a large and ever-expanding one, full of complex and unpredictable innovations, and this book is your guided tour to that world. We're going to go just about everywhere XML goes these days, and that's going to include some pretty amazing territory. Today, we'll get our start with XML and see what it's good for. Here are today's topics in overview:

The name of the game in XML is data, because XML is all about storing your data—phone directories, business orders, book lists, anything you like. Unlike HTML, XML is not about displaying your data—it's about packaging that data to transport it easily. The main reason XML has experienced such popularity is that it stores its data as text, meaning that XML documents can be transferred using the already-existing Web technology, which was built to transfer HTML documents as text.

We'll start today's work by taking a look at the languages designed to let you store and handle text, called markup languages, and there are plenty of them out there. As we're going to see, XML is both different and more powerful than most other markup languages.

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