XML

XML comes from the eXtensible Markup Language ( "Extensible Markup Language" ). It is an extensible metalanguage (a language used to say something about another) of tags that was developed by the Word Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ), an international trading company that makes recommendations for the World Wide Web.


XML is an adaptation of SGML ( Standard Generalized Markup Language ), a language that allows the organization and tagging of documents. This means that XML is not a language in itself, but a system that allows defining languages ​​according to needs. The XHTML , the 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. The metalanguage appears as a standard that structures the exchange of information between the different platforms.


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, the XSL ( Extensible Stylesheet Language ) and the XLINK (which tries to transcend the limitations of hypertext links in HTML ) stand out.


The validity of documents (that is, that their syntactic structure is correctly developed) depends on the specified relationship between the different elements from an external definition or document.


As it is analyzed, XML presents a series of very attractive advantages for developers, especially because it allows to relate applications of different languages ​​and platforms; however, this itself can be seen as a double-edged sword, since it does not encourage the search for compatibility. The universality that XML pursues 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 utility

Since, to a large extent, the usefulness of a tool depends on the creativity of its user, it is impossible to summarize all applications of XML. In short, it can be said that it offers the ability to structure and represent 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, tagged, specified in their location and related 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 which is, without a doubt, its strong point: it allows you to communicate with other applications, from different platforms and regardless of origin. of information in common. 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.


The web services, common concept in this era, are components of the network providing the ability to perform a series varied operations, through specific methods that use the XML metalanguage for communications, thanks to which any platform can do use of its advantages.


Finally, XML is one of those tools that, despite its low complexity, hide great potential, thanks to being easy to use and undeniably useful.

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