Chapter 19. XML
XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a
meta-language for marking up text documents with structural tags,
similar to those found in HTML and SGML documents. XML has become
popular because its structural markup allows documents to describe
their own format and contents. XML enables "portable
data," and it can be quite powerful when combined
with the "portable code" enabled by
Java.
Because of the popularity of XML, there are a number of tools for
parsing and manipulating XML documents. And because XML documents are
becoming more and more common, it is worth your time to learn how to
use some of those tools to work with XML. The examples in this
chapter introduce you to simple XML parsing and manipulation. If you
are familiar with the basic structure of an XML file, you should have
no problem understanding them. Note that there are many subtleties to
working with XML; this chapter doesn't attempt to
explain them all. To learn more about XML, try Java and
XML, by Brett McLaughlin, or XML Pocket
Reference, by Robert Eckstein, both from
O'Reilly.
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