XML - Practical uses?

[Tom Bradford]

Trent Shipley wrote:
> So what was the point of SGML?
>     XML is basically SGML-lite.

There are some significant differences between the two.  SGML has
historically been used predominantly for document representation, while
XML is being adopted more for data representation.  Also, XML is very
strict about nesting, case, and tag enclosure, where SGML can allow you
to be very liberal with how you produce a document.

Regarding 'writing in XML'.  XML is a syntax used for definining
tag-based languages, and while those languages can be used for
programming, they're typically used for representing complex and
free-form data.  The problem that most people encounter when approaching
XML is that they think of it as an HTML replacement and it definitely is
not.  XHTML is an HTML replacement using XML.

-- 
Tom Bradford --- The dbXML Project --- http://www.dbxml.org/
We store your XML data a hell of a lot better than /dev/null