XML is widely used in the era of web development. It is also used to simplify data storage and data sharing.
The main features or advantages of XML are given below.
If you need to display dynamic data in your HTML document, it will take a lot of work to edit the HTML each time the data changes.
With XML, data can be stored in separate XML files. This way you can focus on using HTML/CSS for display and layout, and be sure that changes in the underlying data will not require any changes to the HTML.
With a few lines of JavaScript code, you can read an external XML file and update the data content of your web page.
In the real world, computer systems and databases contain data in incompatible formats.
XML data is stored in plain text format. This provides a software- and hardware-independent way of storing data.
This makes it much easier to create data that can be shared by different applications.
One of the most time-consuming challenges for developers is to exchange data between incompatible systems over the Internet.
Exchanging data as XML greatly reduces this complexity, since the data can be read by different incompatible applications.
Upgrading to new systems (hardware or software platforms), is always time consuming. Large amounts of data must be converted and incompatible data is often lost.
XML data is stored in text format. This makes it easier to expand or upgrade to new operating systems, new applications, or new browsers, without losing data.
Different applications can access your data, not only in HTML pages, but also from XML data sources.
With XML, your data can be available to all kinds of "reading machines" (Handheld computers, voice machines, news feeds, etc), and make it more available for blind people, or people with other disabilities.
A lot of new Internet languages are created with XML.
Here are some examples:
