Summary

In this section, we have surveyed the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification and its various application areas. We have seen that the XML specification can help identify document parts (i.e. header, title, paragraphs, type faces, images) within Web pages, articles and similar document models.

XML can also be used to define new markup languages, that is a particular group of XML tags that serve a definite purpose. Such a characteristic of XML allows infinite number of standards and specifications to be developed. New XML specifications and widely available XML processing tools ease the methods of configuration file handling, universal data modeling, data exchange between distributed and legacy systems and much more.

Nevertheless, we see that whether information be in the form of a document, a configuration file, or a program output, what XML basically does is to distinguish and name individual pieces of information, or simply creating metadata about data.In today’s information age, XML becomes very crucial in access and management of metadata.

In the following section, we explore how XML is used to model metadata for the Web and its content. We briefly describe several markup languages that are defined for this purpose.