Teach Yourself MS Office 2003 In 24 Hours

Introduction to XML

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. As you might guess from its name, XML is closely tied to HTML (the language behind Web pages), and both look very similar. As a matter of fact, all XML code resides inside HTML code, so without HTML, XML would not be possible.

Even XML support inside of Office 2003 is still not as complete as some would prefer, but Microsoft has made it clear that XML support will certainly be with Office and will play a role in each succeeding version.

HTML includes a set of specific commands, known as command tags. These command tags determine how that part of a Web page will look.

Here is a line of HTML code:

They say cars sometimes are <i>racy</i> in Indianapolis!

If this line appears on a Web page, you would see the following on your screen when you viewed the Web page:

They say cars sometimes are racy in Indianapolis!

Your Web browser would see the starting command tag <i> and know to show all text in italics until the terminating command tag, </i>. Terminating command tags, as you can see, usually begin with a forward slash indicating that a particular format or hyperlink is being completed and that the Web browser is to stop formatting at that point.

Whereas HTML deals with formatting Web pages and handling hyperlinks from one Web page to another, XML is a set of command tags that describe actual data and not just how the name of the data is to look in a Web browser.