Five cases of using XML (conversion)

I have met many people in many seminars and training classes who do not understand why XML is used or how to use XML in their applications. Some reports from Gartner suggested that business companies should not be outsiders, and XML should not be ignored. If you still don't know the benefits of XML, you are not the only one.
I decided to write down my conversations with people and media about XML topics and list the five most popular usage of XML in applications. Although these do not include all potential applications of XML, they are at least some of the most important fields.
1. Data Exchange
It is no longer a secret to use XML for data exchange between applications and companies. It should undoubtedly be put first. So why is XML so important in this field? The reason is that XML uses elements and attributes to describe data. During data transmission, XML always retains data structures such as parent/child relationships. Several applications can share and parse the same XML file without having to use the traditional string parsing or disassembling process.
On the contrary, normal files do not describe each data segment (except in the header file), and do not retain the data link structure. Using XML for data exchange can make applications more flexible, because XML data can be accessed by location (the same as normal files) or element name (from the database.
2. Web services
Web services are one of the most exciting revolutions that allow people using different systems and programming languages to communicate with each other and share data. The foundation is that the Web server uses XML to exchange data between systems. Exchange data can be standardized by common XML tags, for example, on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) platform.
SOAP can transmit messages between objects constructed in different programming languages. This means that a C # object can communicate with a Java object. This communication can even happen between objects running on different operating systems. DCOM, CORBA, or Java RMI can only transmit messages between tightly coupled objects, while SOAP can transmit messages between loosely coupled objects.
3. Content Management
XML uses only elements and attributes to describe data, rather than data display methods. In this way, XML provides an excellent way to mark content independent of the platform and language.
Using languages like XSLT, you can easily convert XML files into various formats, such as HTML, WML, PDF, flat file, EDI, and so on. XML has the ability to run on different system platforms and convert to different formats of target files, making it an excellent choice in the content management application system.