XML – The Way of the Future

By Scott Babcock

XML has been around a few years now and has started to become a standard in the web development world. As time goes on XML becomes more and more popular. XML, simply put, is the future of web; but why? What is so great about XML? For that matter; what is XML?

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. Basically it is an extremely flexible way of storing data.

What’s great about XML is that it is so powerful while still being so flexible. You can store any data in XML no matter how detailed it is and as long as whatever is looking at the XML knows the format it can read that data.

XML is the future of web because it does two things very well, transmit any kind of data and allow anything to read it. This means that your phone can read data that was sent from a news or weather website. Or your website can read information on product inventory sent by your suppliers. The possibilities are only limited by what we want to do with it.

Want to learn more about XML? Go to www.w3schools.com/xml.

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