In layman’s terms, HTML is a presentation language, whereas XML is a data-description language.įor example, if you were to go to any ecommerce Website and download a product listing, you’d probably get something like this: HTML rarely (if ever) provides information about how the document is structured or what it means. XML, on the other hand, isn’t just suited to the Web – it can be used in a variety of different contexts, some of which may not have anything to do with humans interacting with content (for example, Web Services use XML to send requests and responses back and forth). HTML’s sole purpose is to allow anyone to quickly create Web documents that can be shared with other people. It becomes cumbersome if you want to display documents in a mobile device or do anything that’s even slightly complicated, such as translating the content from German to English. XML was created because HTML is specifically designed to describe documents for display in a Web browser, and not much else. For example, with XML we can create other languages, such as RSS, MathML (a mathematical markup language), and even tools like XSLT. XML is a meta-language: a language that allows us to create or define other languages. However, it’s important to realize that XML is not just a language. It’s much more flexible than HTML because it allows you to create your own custom tags. Language: XML is a language that’s very similar to HTML.However, XML allows you to define your own set of tags. In fact, the elements you’ll create in XML will be very similar to the elements you’ve already been creating in your HTML documents. Markup: The most recognizable feature of XML is its tags, or elements (to be more accurate).
Another way to think about extensibility is to consider that XML allows all of us to extend our notion of what a document is: it can be a file that lives on a file server, or it can be a transient piece of data that flows between two computer systems (as in the case of Web Services).
It lets you define your own tags, the order in which they occur, and how they should be processed or displayed. The essence of XML is in its name: Extensible Markup Language.
0 kommentar(er)
