Why is XML such an important development?

XML Interview Questions and Answers

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4. Why is XML such an important development?

It removes two constraints which were holding back Web developments:
1. dependence on a single, inflexible document type (HTML) which was being much abused for tasks it was never designed for;
2. the complexity of full SGML, whose syntax allows many powerful but hard-to-program options.
XML allows the flexible development of user-defined document types. It provides a robust, non-proprietary, persistent, and verifiable file format for the storage and transmission of text and data both on and off the Web; and it removes the more complex options of SGML, making it easier to program for.

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Other Interview Questions

• How can I handle embedded HTML in my XML
• What's a Document Type Definition (DTD) and where do I get one?
• How do I support very large resources?
• Aren't XML, SGML, and HTML all the same thing?
• How can I declare XML namespaces so that all elements and attributes are in their scope?
• How do different XML technologies treat XML namespace declarations?
• How do I include one XML file in another?
• Can the content model in an element type declaration contain element types whose names come from other XML namespaces?
• How would you build a search engine for large volumes of XML data?
• When constructing an XML DTD, how do you create an external entity reference in an attribute value?
• More...