Guru's Guide to SQL Server™ Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML, The

XML: An Overview

Thanks to the World Wide Web, HTML has taken over the world. And yet, despite its ubiquity and popularity, HTML has always had a number of serious limitations. You don't have to build Web applications for very long before you run into some of them. HTML works reasonably well for formatting informal documents, but not so well for more complex tasks. It was never intended to describe the structure of data, but business needs have caused it to be used to do just that. The fact that it's being used to do things it was never intended to do has highlighted many of its shortcomings. It has created the need for a more powerful markup language—one that's data-centric rather than display-centric, one that doesn't just know how to format ...