Setting the Stage

Abstract

The World Wide Web is a communications network that provides ­connections among individuals, corporations, and government agencies. In order to exchange written information, the communicating parties must agree on how ­documents will be represented. This is achieved through a common understanding of markup. XML, the extensible markup language, provides mechanisms to describe document structures, and its use is becoming increasingly widespread, not only for representing conventional documents, but also Web pages, graphics and other ­notations, metadata representing document features, traditional business data, and services available on the Web.