As object-oriented technology is being used in internet/e-commerce applications, the need for a standard way to pass data among disperate applications has grown. The extensible markup language (XML) has been developed to solve this problem, and to allow for the creation of advanced web-based applications.
This tutorial will describe XML, and will compare and contrast XML to both Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The tutorial will cover the basics of creating Document Type Definitions DTD’s and stylesheets. We will then discuss what markup lanauges have been created using XML. Tools for parsing, validating and displaying XML documents will also be covered.
The tutorial will continue with a discussion of how XML can be used by programmers using a language like Java. We will discuss how data objects can be stored and transported among distributed objects using XML. We will discuss advantages and disadvantages of using XML as a common data object format.'