An exciting development of late has been the emergence of XML and the synergy that XML has with Java and the Internet. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a data interchange, data storage format. XML fills a need for a simple yet powerful data storage, transmission, and exchange format. As such, XML poses no threat to the database vendors and products.

While HTML has been a great medium for getting information out to the enterprise, it is lacking in the fact that all of that data is completely unstructured. XML solves this problem by giving an extensible structure to data while allowing this data to be displayed in HTML browsers (by using CSS or XLS to provide formatting rules for the data).

DTD's are XML document structures that have been defined so that the XML based parser can validate that the document is in the right format, that it has all of the required elements and the elements all have the proper datatypes in them. You are not forced to use the dtd's when you write XML, but XML is forced to be in the proper format. A properly formatted XML document is said to be "well formed". The XML parser will reject any document that is not "well formed".

XML may very well have as big an impact as Java has. The reason is simple, XML does for data what Java has done for programming - provides a standard, clean, cross system/cross platform, non-proprietary way of accessing shared data.

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