ABSTRACT
Some reasons can be identifi ed at the basis of XML’s popularity. First, diff erent from some markup languages that are purposespecifi c (e.g., HTML for describing document appearance) and that cannot be reused for a diff erent goal, XML is a self-describing format in which the markup elements represent the information content. us, XML completely leaves the interpretation of such data to the application that reads them, and information content is separated from information rendering, making it easy to provide multiple views of the same data. By leaving the names, hierarchy, and meanings of elements/attributes open and defi nable, XML lays the foundation for creating custom and modular (new formats can be defi ned by combining and reusing other formats) XML-based markup languages. Also, XML has a plain text format, which means that it is both human and machine-readable. e wide availability of tools for text fi le authoring so ware facilitates rapid XML document authoring and maintenance,
and cross-platform interoperability. is was not so easy before XML’s advent when most data interchange formats were proprietary “binary” formats, and therefore not easily shared by diff erent so ware applications or across diff erent computing platforms. Moreover, the strict syntax and parsing requirements allow the appropriate parsing algorithms to remain simple, effi cient, and consistent. XML is a robust, logically verifi able format based on international standards and is unencumbered by licenses or restrictions. Lastly, it is well supported. us, by choosing XML, it is possible to access a large and growing community of tools, services, and technologies based on it (XLink , XPointer, XSLT, but also RDF and the semantic web).
