PC Training & Consulting Weblog

XML Overview

March 16, 2004

XML Basics and Benefits by P.G. Daly, 12/8/2003

From XML's inception circa 1996 through the initial hype blitz up to the present day, the term XML has been ubiquitous. What does it all mean, and what do you really need to know?

For starters, XML stands for Extensible Markup Language and it grew organically from the need to improve the functionality of Web technologies through the use of a more flexible and adaptable means to identify information. XML is a metalanguage. That is, it is a language that describes other languages.

XML Basics, Part II: The Key Concepts by P.G. Daly , 1/13/2004

In Part I of this series I answered the question, "What is XML?" Here in Part II of XML Basics, I will define, discuss, and illustrate some of the key concepts crucial to understanding and working with XML documents.

XML Basics Part III: An Example of Well-Formed and Valid XML by P.G. Daly, 2/10/2004

In the example we are going to walk through, I am going to build a pretend movie catalog using XML.

XML Basics, Part IV: Formatting Output by P.G. Daly, 3/15/2004

Welcome to the fourth and final part in this series of XML Basics. We will complete our exploration by using XSLT to format the output of your XML files.

To recap our journey thus far, Part I explored the definition and benefits of XML, Part II examined the detailed concepts of writing and working with XML, and Part III tied it all together with an easy to follow example.

This series of four articles is a decent introduction to XML, with one fairly complete example. mjh