Working with Structured Data
HTML lets you determine how a document will be displayed in a Web browser, such as by telling Internet Explorer to display certain text in bold type or to start a new paragraph. However, HTML doesn’t tell you anything about the meaning of data in a document. Internet Explorer might "know" it should display a set of data in a table, but it wouldn’t "know" that the data represented an Excel spreadsheet.
You can add metadata, or data about data, to Web documents using Extensible Markup Language (XML). While a full discussion of XML is beyond the scope of this book, the following bit of XML code shows how to identify an Excel workbook in XML:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <Workbook xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet" ...
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