XML is a metalanguage.
XML is a term that comes from eXtensible Markup Language . It is an extensible tag metalanguage (a language used to say something about another) that was developed by the Word Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ), an international trade society that develops recommendations for the World Wide Web .
XML is an adaptation of SGML ( Standard Generalized Markup Language ), a language that allows the organization and labeling of documents . This means that XML is not a language in itself, but rather a system that allows languages to be defined according to needs. XHTML , MathML and SVG are some of the languages that XML has the ability to define.
Databases, text documents, spreadsheets and web pages are some of the fields of application of XML. Metalanguage appears as a standard that structures the exchange of information between different platforms.
Advantages of XML
Experts point out several advantages that derive from the use of XML, such as: it is extensible (new tags can be added after the design of the document); its parser is standard (it does not require changes for each version of the metalanguage); facilitates the analysis and processing of XML documents created by third parties.
Among the languages created with XML, XSL ( Extensible Stylesheet Language ) and XLINK (which attempts to transcend the limitations of hypertext links in HTML ) stand out.
The validity of the documents (that is, that their syntactic structure is correctly developed) depends on the relationship specified between the different elements from a definition or external document.
Depending on how you analyze it, XML presents a series of very attractive advantages for developers, especially because it allows applications from different languages and platforms to be related; However, this can be seen as a double-edged sword, since it does not encourage the search for compatibility. The universality that XML seeks may never come if, instead of taking advantage of it to solve problems, new ones are generated knowing that they will have a solution .
XML comes from the expression “eXtensible Markup Language”.
The usefulness
Since, to a large extent, the usefulness of a tool depends on the creativity of its user, it is impossible to summarize all the applications of XML. In short, it can be said that it offers the possibility of structuring and representing data. Nowadays, it is common for programs to include configuration files in this format; such is the case of Apache and applications created with .NET technology (from Microsoft).
When developing a program with a graphical interface, it is necessary to organize all the images so that they are loaded as they are needed, and XML is of great help in these cases: it allows them to be grouped, labeled, specify their location and relate them to other data, according to the needs of the designers.
But in addition to facilitating the organization of resources and the configuration of a program, XML plays a very important role that is, without a doubt, its strong point: it allows it to communicate with other applications, from different platforms and regardless of the origin. of common information. You can have, for example, a program running on Windows with a SQL Server database, and another on Linux with Oracle, both sharing data thanks to an XML structure.
Web services , a very common concept in this era, are components of the Internet that provide the possibility of carrying out a varied series of operations, through specific methods that take advantage of the XML metalanguage for their communications, thanks to which any platform can do use of its advantages.
Finally, XML is one of those tools that, despite its low complexity, hides great potential, thanks to being easy to use and undeniably useful.