Xml For Self Schematizing Data
There seem to be two camps of user of the ExtensibleMarkupLanguage:
- XMLers who want to use XmlSchemas and DocumentTypeDefinitions
- XMLers who want to use XML to record self schematizing data, where every data item collected may have ad-hoc fields and notes, and where updating a central schema would be wasted time.
XML is a self schematizing data format, that allows such ad-hoc structure to be recorded in a slightly better way than simply recording everything as raw text. Generic non-DTD based XML tools can perform many useful queries on such data.