But remember, HTML was designed to render text not define meaning. That's where XML comes in. With XML, tags provide logical structure not formatting information. Stand-alone data can now have intrinsic logical structure. Since XML is text with tags, an XML document is immediately understandable to humans without the need for a proprietary program to decode proprietary formats.
Programmers examining an XML data document can make sense of it.
Because tags provide context and meaning, search programs can find relevant data. Database storage and retrieval. The potential of XML has not been lost on the major industry players. Both IBM and Oracle provide freely available tools for moving data into and out of databases and Microsoft has a major initiative called BizTalk to deliver industry standard XML across a growing number of industry segments. Once XML arrives at a server, it can be transformed and ported across the enterprise.