Role of XML in XHTML Development

With the introduction of XHTML in the field of web development, developers took the use and functions of HTML to an advanced level. The markup language of XHTML has been developed through a combination of the markup language HTML and the extensible markup language XML. HTML is the most commonly used markup language in which most of the websites are being encoded while XML is a set of rules that help in encoding of documents in machine-readable form. The goals of XML designs aim for simplicity, generality and usability for the internet. It works upon a textual data format through a strong support from Unicode to support different languages. This combination has provided more strength and ease to the process of XHTML Development. XML mainly focuses on documents in the whole process; however, it is also widely used for representation of arbitrary data structures. Keeping in mind the advantages provided by XML language, large number of XML-based languages were developed till 2009. The most popular ones include RSS, Atom, XHTML and SOAP. This markup language has also become the default language for many of the office-productivity tools like MS Office, Open Office, and Apples iWork. All the essentials constructs that are used in general process of PSD to XHTML Conversion come under XML specification. Some of the important ones include Unicode Character, Processor and Application, Markup and Content, Tag, Element, and Attribute. The Unicode Character includes every legal Unicode character that appears in XML document as XML is made of a string of characters. The processor of a XML helps to analyze the markup of a document and passes the structured information to an application during the process of PSD to XHTML conversion. The processor of XML is also referred to as XML parser. The markup and content of XML is derived from its characters. Both of them are differentiated by an application of syntactic rules. The tags facilitated through XML includes three types namely start-tags, end-tags, and empty-element tags. The XML characters between these tags are element’s content also known as child elements. XML also helps to simply the insertion and management of attributes like names, figures, or numbers in a document. There are some ways through which a XML document can be detected, for instance every XML document starts by declaring some information about them. These documents are also completely made of characters made from the Unicode repertoire. This feature of XML also helps to identity the encoding of these Unicode characters in any document.