What is XML and Its benefits?

What is XML?

XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language.

XML was designed to store and transport data.

XML was designed to be both human- and machine-readable.

XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags.

XML is platform independent and language independent.

Example

Version is a tag used to show which version of XML is used.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<UserInfo>

      <name>Rajesh</name>

      <age>25</age>

      <occ>Software dev</occ>

      <address>Mathura</address>

</UserInfo>

<root>

      <child>

            <subchild>.....</subchild>

      </child>

</root>

What are the benefits of XML?

Simplicity: Easy to read and understand the XML coded information.

Openness: Endorsed by all software industry market leaders.

Extensibility: We can define own tags as It is extensible because it has no fixed set of tags.

Self-descriptive: XML documents do not need special schema set-up like traditional databases to store data. XML documents can be stored without such definitions, because they contain metadata in the form of tags and attributes.

Scalable: XML is not in binary format so you can create and edit files with anything and it is also easy to debug.

Fast access: XML documents are arranged in hierarchical form so it is comparatively faster.