Why Reference Is Important
Establishing standards have been an important part of our interactions as humans for a very long time. The necessity of standard weights and measures comes from the need to standardize trade; and the need to standardize XML is really no different.
The idea behind XML, after all, is to be able to exchange information independent of applications and systems. If you have an XML-based application and a document with a DTD, you can exchange that document with any other system capable of handling XML. You can do that because of the XML v.1.0 Recommendation from the W3C. If we didn't have that recommendation to base our XML documents on, we would quickly encounter incompatibilities.
For example, let's take a quick look at ...
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