Introduction

The popularity of the Internet took off with the advent of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, a world of information was available using a Web browser and dial-up access to the Internet. Without diverse content, however, the World Wide Web would be of little interest.

The wide availability of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editors allowed people with little technical knowledge to publish their content on the Web for the world to see. The proliferation of personal Web sites that display family pictures and lists of hobbies is testament to this. HTML is an excellent language for defining the presentation of data, but it is not very useful in describing the data itself. As the Web matured, it became apparent that separation of presentation from content was highly desirable. This separation allowed people such as graphic artists to concentrate on presentation and allowed people such as programmers to concentrate on creating and manipulating data.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged as the Web standard for representing and transmitting data over the Internet. XML is a generic, platform-independent data description language and as such has gained great popularity in the computer industry, adopted by many of the largest companies in the computer industry. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced standards for several XML-related technologies.

Microsoft has realized the importance of XML and has been providing XML support within their products for the past several years. Internet Explorer has continually added new support for XML with each release. XML support...