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Before we start using XML data, let's understand what XML is and why people use it. First,
what is XML used for? It's used primarily to build data driven applications.
It's also used in RSS feeds like a news feed or a podcast feed.
It's used in audio and video playlists, closed captioning and subtitles.
In fact, AJAX is asynchronous JavaScript and XML, so XML is used in AJAX. It's used in
configuration files like your iTunes library, bookmarks for your web browser, and it is
even used by Adobe Dreamweaver to tell which tools display in the coding toolbar.
So why do people use XML? For one, it's extremely versatile, meaning
just about any language can interpret and use XML data.
Also you can build a simple database using XML without having to worry about learning
a database language like mySQL. XML is not application-specific, meaning it
doesn't matter which application using and in fact you don't need to use
any application other than a plain text editor to edit an XML file.
Another benefit of using XML is that it's very easy to learn. It's quite similar to
HTML. So with all those benefits why would you not
use XML? It is not as simple to password protect an
XML file like it is a database because it's just a text file and
also it's not ideal for large amounts of data. In those situations, it's better to use a
database. So now that you understand some benefits of using XML data, why people
use it and why you wouldn't use it, let's start learning about what XML looks like.