XML Training: Concepts

What is XML
and Why Should You Care?

(1-hour to 1-day lecture formats available)

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has burst onto the text processing scene with a bang and is widely hailed as the solution to all interchange and information retrieval problems.

While many of these claims are unrealistic, XML is a widely supported data format that is designed for re-use and interchange, which makes it a useful tool in addressing the problems of information interchange, retrieval, longevity, and re-use. XML is a relatively new standard, originally designed for text interchange on the World Wide Web and now in use for multi-media publishing, data interchange, electronic commerce and transaction interchange, and application-to-application communication. XML-tagged data can provide high precision searching in Web environments and allow users to interchange reuseable text over the Internet.

This brief introduction to XML includes an overview of the parts of an XML-based publishing application, the basic concepts underlying XML, and a discussion of how XML is being used now.

Prerequisites: None.