TABLE OF CONTENTS Imagine for a moment that you are tasked with the responsibility of developing a new method of describing and housing data. This method must be flexible enough to handle a great variety of data models, data types, etc. It must be able to describe a car, a family of people, and a farm. What would you come up with? Hopefully you would come up with something like XML, because XML is designed to handle a variety of data structures and types.
XML is an abbreviation for Extensible Markup Language. XML documents often have a file extension of "xml." Even though XML files conform to a common specification, the data they contain can vary greatly from file to file and from structure to structure.
Companies and organizations create their own XML document definitions to store their own type of data with their own data structures. For example, there are XML documents to store financial transactions, documents to store GIS information, and documents to store architectural bills of material. XML formats have been devised to store genealogy, sports statistics, and cooking recipes. Programs such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access can export their data to XML files.
The XML file structure allows it to be so flexible and powerful. Here is a small snippet of an XML file:
1 119-L A 9 119-LA 9 CANTRELL WILLIAM B & EVELYN W 9000 220 BRIDGEWATER RD KNOXVILLE TENNESSEE 37919 KNOX NW-COUNTY RA 0 0
