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Interchange of Data Among Applications

The document discusses how XML is self-describing and provides an example of XML code describing a person with their name, birthdate, and deathdate. It also discusses how XML is well documented and is useful for interchange of data among different applications like financial programs.

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Sai Kuamr
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10 views1 page

Interchange of Data Among Applications

The document discusses how XML is self-describing and provides an example of XML code describing a person with their name, birthdate, and deathdate. It also discusses how XML is well documented and is useful for interchange of data among different applications like financial programs.

Uploaded by

Sai Kuamr
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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3236-7 ch01.F.

qc

6/29/99

1:03 PM

Page 7

Chapter 1 An Eagles Eye View of XML

At a higher level, XML is self-describing. Suppose youre an information archaeologist


in the 23rd century and you encounter this chunk of XML code on an old floppy disk
that has survived the ravages of time:
<PERSON ID=p1100 SEX=M>
<NAME>
<GIVEN>Judson</GIVEN>
<SURNAME> McDaniel</SURNAME>
</NAME>
<BIRTH>
<DATE>21 Feb 1834</DATE> </BIRTH>
<DEATH>
<DATE>9 Dec 1905</DATE> </DEATH>
</PERSON>

Even if youre not familiar with XML, assuming you speak a reasonable facsimile of
20th century English, youve got a pretty good idea that this fragment describes a
man named Judson McDaniel, who was born on February 21, 1834 and died on
December 9, 1905. In fact, even with gaps in, or corruption of the data, you could
probably still extract most of this information. The same could not be said for some
proprietary spreadsheet or word-processor format.
Furthermore, XML is very well documented. The W3Cs XML 1.0 specification and
numerous paper books like this one tell you exactly how to read XML data. There
are no secrets waiting to trip up the unwary.

Interchange of Data Among Applications


Since XML is non-proprietary and easy to read and write, its an excellent
format for the interchange of data among different applications. One such
format under current development is the Open Financial Exchange Format
(OFX). OFX is designed to let personal finance programs like Microsoft Money
and Quicken trade data. The data can be sent back and forth between programs
and exchanged with banks, brokerage houses, and the like.
CrossReference

OFX is discussed in Chapter 2.

As noted above, XML is a non-proprietary format, not encumbered by copyright,


patent, trade secret, or any other sort of intellectual property restriction. It has
been designed to be extremely powerful, while at the same time being easy for
both human beings and computer programs to read and write. Thus its an
obvious choice for exchange languages.
By using XML instead of a proprietary data format, you can use any tool that
understands XML to work with your data. You can even use different tools for
different purposes, one program to view and another to edit for instance. XML
keeps you from getting locked into a particular program simply because thats what

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