How do XDI documents differ from HTML documents?
First, XDI documents are XML documents, so they take advantage of the many features of XML architecture. However XDI documents are similar to HTML documents in that they are the common data representation format used by all XDI Dataweb sites. In other words, a key purpose of XDI is to provide a “schema-neutral” format for expressing shared data. This is what allows XDI data elements to be easily shared, linked, and synchronized across any number of Dataweb sites the same way HTML or XHTML Web pages can be easily shared and linked across any number of Web sites. • How do XDI documents differ from conventional XML documents? While XDI documents are valid XML documents, the key difference is that they use a very simple XML schema (the proposed XDI meta-schema) expresses the metadata normally encoded as XML element tags and attribute names as XRIs. By using this approach: • Every data element at any level of the XDI “graph” of data (including versions) becomes addressable using XRI syntax.
