Why XML?

• Why would you, or anyone, choose to use XML?
• Unlike HTML, it's not for presentation. You can use cascaded style sheets, or XSLT to display XML documents.
• There are three main reasons to use XML.
  1. Data transfer format. My CANT neural thing uses XML for parameter settings I could have used a text file, but XML is a bit of a standard for this.
  2. Automated searching. Looking through natural language text is hard for machines. If you provide some hard semantics (via tags), it's a lot easier. This is the web 2.0 answer.
  3. Ontologies. An extension of the other two is that you can use XML as a knowledge representation language. So, you can represent a lot of domain knowledge, which is great for AI systems.