Why XML?

• Industry Support/Cross platform
• XML provides a universal standard for representing and typing data which is not operating system or platform specific.
• XSL provides a standard for manipulating XML, including but not limited to the generation of HTML for web sites. Other applications include XML reformatting to convert between legacy EDI standards or between different versions/implementations of XML.
• A DTD includes type definitions that allow it to be verified for accuracy and to avoid data corruption. DTD's can be applied to XML documents for automatic verification.
• XML standards exist for many vertical industries, EDI, etc. as an agreed upon format for exchanging information such as purchase orders, inventory and product information.
• XML and XSL can be combined to reformat XML data into a variety of HTML designs, separating data from display - one of the many important principles of good design. Furthermore, XML and XSL can be used to personalize a web page, or reformat it after detecting the browser (e.g. convert to WML)
• Allows web site look and feel to be controlled by designers with style sheets (XSL), while data to feed these style sheets (XML) is provided by application programmers. Other approaches frequently embed programming logic inside HTML (e.g. cold fusion) or control HTML generation completely inside application code. Both of these non-XML approaches make it difficult to change site design without programmers to modify and test changes.
• Protocols can be designed around XML (e.g. message formats internal to the application). These allow the use of standard XML parsers to speed development time, and allow DTD validation to be performed easily on messages. This approach leverages XML benefits to networked applications, which use sockets, RMI, CORBA, or messaging/JMS.
• Typing of data allows for your data to be typed so you can easily extend your data definitions in the future, while still supporting earlier versions of data encoding using earlier definitions. The older data or applications would be missing optional fields in the latest XML type definitions, but could still be processed. This allows for rapid upgrading of systems, without having to migrate older data and applications immediately to the new feature sets.