On Thursday 21 June 2001 11:53 am, Steven M. Klass wrote: > I apologize for this potentially lame question, but I am curious and > it's killing me. > > What is the point of XML and what practical benifit would I get from > writing in it? XML exists primarily to markup data in a consistent way that makes parsing much easier later. Now the short answer to what benefit you get from writing in it is "none (in the way that you are thinking of using it)" XML is only marginally useful for humans to read -- it's intended for software to parse. Now let's take a mailbox with tens of thousands of messages in it. We want to search this mailbox for a particular string in the body of the message but *NOT* in the headers or in any attachments. This would be doable, but not fun. The parsing would require finding out where the headers started and ended and where the attachments started and ending. Everytime you ran the search, these starting and ending points would have to be recalculated. Now say we have the same mailbox but this time, each message is marked-up using XML. Something like (*very* simplistic): Our search engine can now go through the file *very* quickly to find the body elements.. because we have already shown where the body is! If we wanted to extend this, we could have such things as: Then, we could also search for all From lines without having to use some convoluted regexp. Does that make sense? XML is a standardized way for programs to figure out just what the data it's seeing really is. -- Kurt Granroth | http://www.granroth.org KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer granroth@kde.org | granroth@suse.com KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop