Chapter 18. XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a cousin of HTML that has become important as a data management tool. XML documents are text files marked with tags that indicate the structure of the content of the files. XML is software and platform independent, which means that it provides an excellent environment for transferring data between database systems.
XML has been accepted by the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has become a de facto standard for cross-platform data transfers. Because it is an open source specification, a number of application programming languages have been built on top of it, such as XHTML, RSS, MathML, GraphML, Scalable Vector Graphics, and MusicXML.
Major DBMSs handle XML in two ways. Some store XML documents ...

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