XML as a Metalanguage
A metalanguage is a language used to describe another language. For example, consider the words "noun," "verb," "adverb," and "adjective." These words describe the structure of sentences in most human languages, so they're part of a language used to describe a language. The advantage of a metalanguage is that it can be used to define more than one implemented language.
First and foremost, XML is a metalanguage used to define other languages. To understand this, you need to accept a very general definition of the word "language." For the purposes of this book, consider any form of data in a database to be a language. Since XML can be used to define the form of the data, it's a metalanguage.
As a metalanguage, XML allows ...
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