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.