XML-An Emerging Trend

 XML-an emerging trend…..

XML is now emerging as a new trend for web development, which allows unprecedented flexibility and robustness. XML has numerous advantages over its predecessor, HTML. The first benefit of XML is that because you are writing your own markup language, you are not restricted to a limited set of tags defined by proprietary vendors.

Rather than waiting for standards bodies to adopt tag set enhancements (a process which can take quite some time), or for browser companies to adopt each other's standards, with XML, you can create your own set of tags at your own pace.

Of course, not only are you free to develop at your own pace, but you are free to develop tools that meet your needs exactly. By defining your own tags, you create the markup language in terms of your specific problem set! Rather than relying on a generic set of tags, which suits everyone's needs adequately,

XML allows every person/organization to build their own tag library which suits their needs perfectly.
Because of customized tags XML sheets are easier to understand. Operations like searching and sorting are also easier to implement. Search engines can simply parse the description-bearing tags rather than muddling in the data. Tags provide the search engines with the intelligence they lack. Complex relationships such as trees and inheritance can be easily communicated. Also the XML programs are of a self-describing nature because of simpler structure.

So is XML the Ultimate Solution?

The answer is NO. There is silver bullet that exists in the field of technology. XML in itself is not fulfilling. XML will never be able oust HTML. XML, HTML and SGML will always co exist.

There are certain issues that still remain to be sorted, before XML can be considered to be an all round success story. For one, XML requires a processing application. The nice thing about HTML was that you knew that if you wrote an HTML document, anyone, anywhere in the world, could read your document using Netscape. Well, with XML documents, that is not yet the case. There are no XML browsers on the market yet (although the latest version of IE does a pretty good job of incorporating XSL and XML documents provided HTML is the output).

Thus, XML documents must either be converted into HTML before distribution or converting it to HTML on-the-fly by middleware. Barring translation, developers must code their own processing applications.

The most common tactic used now is to write parsing routines in DHTML or Java, or Server-Side Perl to parse through an XML document, apply the formatting rules specified by the style sheet, and "convert" it all to HTML.

However, this takes some magic and the amount of work necessary even to print "hello world" are sometimes enough to dissuade developers from adopting the technology.

Nevertheless, parsing algorithms and tools continue to improve over time as more and more people see the long-term benefits of migrating their data to XML. The backend part of XML will continue to become simpler and simpler. Already Internet Explorer and Netscape provide a decent amount of built in XML parsing tools. The future of XML is thus bright.