The second example is far more readable in human terms, and it also provides more functionality and versatility to nonhumans. With this set of tags, applications can easily access the book’s title or author name without splitting any strings or searching for spaces. And, for developers writing code, searching for the author name in an XML document becomes much more natural when the name of the element is title, for example, rather than H1. |
Indenting the tags in the previous example was done purely for readability and certainly isn’t necessary in your XML documents. You may find, however, when you create your own documents, indentation helps you to read them. |
To process the previous XML data, no special editors are needed to create XML documents, although a number of them are available. And no breakthrough technology is involved. Much of the attention swirling around XML comes from its simplicity. Specifically, interest in XML has grown because of the way XML simplifies the tasks of the developers who employ it in their designs. Many of the tough tasks software developers have to do again and again over the years are now much easier to accomplish. XML also makes it easier for components to communicate with each other because it provides a standardized, structured language recognized by the most popular platforms today. In fact, in the .NET platform, Microsoft has demonstrated how important XML is by using it as the underpinning of the entire platform. As you see in later chapters, .NET relies heavily on XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) in its framework and base services to make development easier and more efficient. |