XML Companion, The, Third Edition

XML documents

The term document tends to be employed when discussing XML data objects or files, because XML is based on earlier standards that were primarily used to prepare narrative text for publication. This terminology still tends to be used, even when XML is being employed to exchange data between software applications, is never stored in a data file, and is never published or otherwise presented to a human audience. To simplify the discussion in this book, the term 'document' is therefore used to cover all possible ways of storing or exchanging XML data objects.

Naturally, it is still common for XML to appear in stored data files, and in some cases for these files to contain narrative text intended for dissemination and publication. This ...