My 2 minute XML Guide for Advanced Dummies - Beginning XML

I still remember one of the speeches Bill Gates gave some 4 years back in Bangalore, India about Microsoft's plans and on what technologies they are gong to focus on. Out of those 2-3 technologies which he had mentioned, one of them was XML (I forgot the other two ). I am not an XML developer(I even don't know if there is such term as XML developer exist) but here is my little effort to explain XML for advanced dummies. Of course everyone understand the basic structure of XML so I won't waste my time in telling all that. I am giving you some XML terms and links for them to help you dive into advanced XML.

XML, or the Extensible Markup Language, is used in web development because it is a general purpose markup language; it allows the users to define their own tags. A markup language combines text and extra information about the text.

The extra information, for example about the text's structure or presentation, is expressed using markup, which is intermingled with the primary text. Exchange of information between systems, mainly over the internet, is the main purpose of XML. XML is used both in the document encryption part of web development, and in data serialization part; on the serialization stage it has to compete with lighter serialization programming languages, such as YAML, who is more human-legible, and JSON, which is less verbose.

XML is developed to be more human-legible than other languages and at first it was meant to be only a subpart of SGML, or Standard Generalized Markup Language. Other application languages can be paired with XML by adding semantic constraints. Among the most important of these languages there is XHTML, MusicXML, RSS, GraphML, etc.

There have been developed a multiple series of XML extensions. The most frequent and important XML extensions ones are:

XML Encryption - XML Encryption is used in order to define the syntax and encryption of XML content.
XML Signature - XML the defining and processing the rules for creating digital signatures in applications made in XML is made using the XML Signature extension.
XPath - This extension is used when individual parts of an XML document need to be referred to. This extension grants the user to refer to any part of the text inside XML content, data, values, comments, or attributes.
XML Namespace - Whenever a single document is required to contain both XML elements as well as other attributes belonging to different vocabularies, without the risk of naming collision to occur, the XML extension is used.
XPointer - In order for XML files to be served with a great variety of media types, the XPointer system is used in order to address components of XML-based media available on the internet.
XInclude - XML files can include an entire or a part of an external file. In order to do this, web developers use the XInclude extension of XML.
XQuery - This XML extension is used as a easy way to access and manipulate XML content, in such a way SQL and PL/SQL are to ordinary databases.

Explore all the links and follow the links of wiki as well. If you have money than you can buy XML books at Amazon.com otherwise download any book "freely" from avaxhome.org which happens to be one of the biggest warez site on net and almost any book can be downloaded from there.
Please Note - Under your countries copyright laws these may be illegal.