XML stands for eXtended Markup Language. XML has become the lingua-franca of e-business, because it helps systems talk to each other by passing data over the Internet, using user-defined tags. This is an improvement over HTML, where the meta-tags are static and pre-defined by the W3C consortium.
This is best illustrated by an example. To transport a complete data structure using XML, all one has to do is define each field name as a meta-tag for the specific XML file, and one can transfer a complete record, as long or as short as one wants, field by field. These field values can come from the same database, or from different databases, or some from a database / file repository and some others from customer-inputted data. When this file is sent over the Internet, a completely different data processing system can then use the received XML file and interpret the data as per the mutually agreed meta-tags.
For another example of XML in actual use, please look up our article on
RSS. The sample working RSS file / feed
layout presented there is nothing but an XML file, with a .XML extension.
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