Extensible Markup Language (Xm L) is a system for defining specialized markup languages that are used to transmit formatted data.
XML is a simplified version or dialect of SGm L. It allows you to define your own tags in a structured way. It adds order to a world that was getting fragmented with non-standard browser tags. XML has the potential to be the universal data format for communication.

You might want to check some XML Lin Ks for further reading. See also Dt D.

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From the Biz Talk website: Many companies report a strong interest in XML. XML however, is so flexible that this is similar to expressing a strong interest in ASCII characters. Despite the advances that XML affords, they are hard to achieve without a consistent Frame Work for XML implementations.

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One of the weaknesses of a browser-based interface is the necessity of making a round-trip to the server to validate user input, or use of client-side scripting. However, if a DTD is transmitted to the browser along with XML data, and there is some way of running XML through a parser for validation *before* it is sent back to the server, then it might be much easier to do vailidation at the client, but still under control of the server.

Now, this can be taken a little step further, by transmitting multiple "packages" of XML, each with its own DTD, so that (in effect) each field, or a set of interdependent fields can be validated independently at the client.

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What is the difference between " ... or use of client-side scripting" versus XML with respect to validating data? I haven't gotten much beyond creating my own tags with XML (I don't understand much yet) but both techniques are initialized by the client-browser. (It does look like XML is easier to understand/write then Java Script.)

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I don't believe that this is comparing "use of client-side scripting" versus "XML"... The comparison is instead between data validation using "client-side scripting" versus an XML Dt D (which defines what valid data looks like for each XML field). In the absence of the Dt D, XML data is simply the XML structure containing data, which might seem like a totality, until you consider the value that the Dt D adds: The Dt D defines what the format of data in each XML field is, and (sometimes) what possible values exist that could be in each field, and what fields are optional, etc. With all this information, XML data can now be changed in accordance with this information (and therefore correctly validated), and returned to the server. Without the Dt D, the browser needs a different way to examine the data for accuracy: one way is through scripting (javascript or other) that explicitly enforces certain arbitrary rules (which rules comply with the Dt D which is still only known to the server). -- wgcs

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Contributors: Steve Sawyer jMM

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Category XML Category Web Development