I have to say I had a hard time understanding the readings on XML.
I was under the impression that XML is metadata that is attached to HTML documents that computers can read to determine what the documents "are." Apparently there is more to it than that.
XML is a flexible mark-up language that can define what documents are. If I understand the readings correctly, it can also define elements of a document, such as title, author, etc.
It also seems to be able to signal to computer reading the XML to do certain tasks, and link to parts of documents.
A difference between XML and HTML is that HTML defines appearence of a document, while XML does not. It seems that HTML is soewhat restrictive in its potential for customization, but I don't see why HTML can't be expanded to include perform the same function as XML. Why create an entirely new language (or is it family of languages?)?
I also looked at this website. It may be helpful to some.
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I agree that this weeks readings were not the easiest. I perfered the Extending Your Markup article to the others. To my understanding, it seems that it is all a family, as XML was created to extend the language past the limits of html
Eric, you're right. These were tough readings. I was similarly concerned with the need for an additional markup language, when HTML seems to work just fine. If XML can't control the appearance of a document, you'll have to incorporate some HTML in there anyway.
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