Applications using XML

Although there are countless applications that use XML, here are a few examples of the applications that are making use of this technology.

Refined search results - With XML-specific tags, search engines can give users more refined search results. A search engine seeks the term in the tags, rather than the entire document, giving the user more precise results.

EDI Transactions - XML has made electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions accessible to a broader set of users. XML allows data to be exchanged, regardless of the computing systems or accounting applications being used.

Cell Phones - XML data is sent to some cell phones, which is then formatted by the specification of the cell phone software designer to display text, images and even play sounds!

File Converters - Many applications have been written to convert existing documents into the XML standard. An example is a PDF to XML converter.

VoiceXML - Converts XML documents into an audio format so that a user can listen to an XML document.

History of XML

In the 1970’s, Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie invented GML at IBM. GML was used to describe a way of marking up technical documents with structural tags. The initials stood for Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie.

Goldfarb invented the term “mark-up language” to make better use of the initials and it became the Standard Generalised Markup Language.

In 1986, SGML was adopted by the ISO.

SGML is just a specification for defining markup languages.

SGML (Standardized Generalized Markup Language) is the mother of all markup

languages like HTML, XML, XHTML, WML etc...

In 1986, SGML became an international standard for defining the markup languages. It was used to create other languages, including HTML, which is very popular for its use on the web. HTML was made by Tim Berners Lee in 1991.

While on one hand SGML is very effective but complex, on the other, HTML is very easy, but limited to a fixed set of tags. This situation raised the need for a language that was as effective as SGML and at the same time as
simple as HTML. This gap has now been filled by XML.

The development of XML started in 1996 at Sun Microsystems. Jon Bosak with his team began work on a project for remoulding SGML. They took the best of SGML and produced something to be powerful, but much simpler to use.

The World Wide Web Consortium also contributes to the creation and development of the standard for XML. The specifications for XML were laid down in just 26 pages, compared to the 500+ page specification that define SGML.

Difference between HTML and XML

1. XML is designed to carry data.

XML describes and focuses on the data while HTML only displays and focuses on how data looks. HTML is all about displaying information but XML is all about describing information. In current scenario XML is the most common tool for data manipulation and data transmission.

XML is used to store data in files and for sharing data between diverse applications. Unlike HTML document where data and display logic are available in the same file, XML hold only data. Different presentation logics could be applied to display the xml data in the required format. XML is the best way to exchange information.

2. XML is Free and Extensible.
3. XML tags are not predefined. User