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Why XML
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| XML is easily readable by both humans and machines
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| Until now, most formats for storing data were either suitable for interpretation by software programs (e.g. dBase, GIF, etc.), or human readable (text or CSV files) - but not both.
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| XML defines a set of rules that make interpretation by computer very simple. It thus satisfies both needs, because XML documents remain text-based and can still be easily manipulated by a human being.
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| XML is object-oriented
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| While the relational data model is very successful for processing large amounts of table-like data, manipulation of other kinds of data - such as hypertext (i.e. text plus hyperlinks), multimedia, graphics, mathematical or chemical formulas, hierarchical information - are not so straightforward.
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| In contrast, XML is object-oriented in the sense of being suitable for describing objects of the real world or any abstract problem domain by modeling their properties as they are, instead of enforcing a normalized decomposition into various tables linked by relations. This makes XML documents more intuitively understandable and thereby reduces both the time required to design and implement computing systems based on XML.
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| XML is being widely adopted by the computer industry
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| One key factor in the success of the Internet was the wide adoption of the TCP/IP protocol suite by many corporations. This resulted in huge sales volumes and consequently ever decreasing prices for all network components used.
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| XML is widely accepted and implemented by many vendors, this fact will result in higher volumes and lower prices for software components. This is why XML's predecessor, SGML, was never successful on a broad scale. SGML products were typically priced in the ten-thousand dollar range, whereas XML products are today priced in the hundreds.
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| XML is global
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| To better understand the attention that XML has received, it is useful to recall another widely-adopted data standard that everybody takes for granted today: ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
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| While ASCII was restricted to a certain alphabet and writing system, it was still crucial in allowing different computer types and operating systems to freely exchange data. With the adoption of Unicode 1.0 and its continuing evolution. The idea of ASCII was expanded to encompass all languages and writing systems of the world.
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| Today, it is taken for granted that computers are capable of reading and processing text documents based on ASCII or Unicode. XML takes this approach one step further, by building on Unicode and defining a universal way to describe structured data for all different purposes.
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| All XML documents are per definition Unicode-based, but may be stored on disk or transmitted over the network in various different "encodings", such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 . This is, why some people today call XML the "ASCII of the future".
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