XML: What I have Learnt

XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) is a way of storing data by electronic means  that is easily readable by human eyes. It has very few restrictions in terms of application because you are not limited by what tags you can use and it is widely compatible in a way that means data can be moved separately from formatting and without risk of losing data due to incompatibility.   It does this through a series of tags that can be used to group together information to make it simple to search through and easy to transport. Accurately coded, XML can store vast quantities of data that can be searched through with the tags used to define different categories. The easiest way to describe how this works is through explaining its application in the real world. Although I could not find a specific example of a company that uses this we can look at almost any product selling business to see one way in which XML can be applied. If we take a clothing store as a basic example, XML could be used to store information on stock, organised with a number of parameters such as type, colour, size and fabric. These elements can be grouped together for each individual item so it is possible to discover with a few key strokes whether a red, cotton dresses in a size 12 would be in stock.

The great thing about XML is the lack of restrictions that are placed on it: as long as you are able to correctly create tags (XML doesn’t handle errors well) you are not really limited in information you can store and to what purposes these can be applied.