XML

According to the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ) organization "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web." XML is actually a family of several technologies, to which development started in 1996.

XML is is basically a means of placing structured data in a text file. XML uses easy to understand tags and formatting which allows a computer to easily read, understand, and sort its contents. XML has become quite popular for web pages that call or store information into a database of sorts, since the tags and fields can be named and formatted in pretty much anyway you wish.

XML is still very much in development, as is HTML, but isn't nearly used as much since it is still a fairly new technology.

However, with the ever-growing rate of web technologies, and the need for webmasters to make their respective pages as dynamic and as easy to maintain as possible, XML will probably play a vital role in the future, to help ease the pain of having to update and reformat pages to deliver the latest and greatest.

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