Chapter 8. Working with XML
XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is many things to many people. XML provides a mechanism to store documents in a format that can be read and manipulated as easily by programs as by humans. XML provides the basis for programs running on different computers and operating systems to talk to one another over the Web. XML is also a language on top of which a huge number of industry-specific data formats have been created, describing everything from corporate workflow to warehouse inventories to geographic encyclopedias.
To support these and many more functions, a plethora of toolkits has become available to simplify creating, processing, and manipulating XML documents. In an important sense, XML provides another way to model data, and so great benefits are to be had by pairing XML with a view technology, such as JavaServer Pages. The JSP specification itself, along with a number of tags from the standard tag library, make this pairing possible on a number of levels.
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