How does XML combine Documents and data?
Currently “documents” and “data” use distinct technologies that do not easily interoperate. Documents are mainly managed by wordprocessing packages, whilst data are managed by relational or object-oriented databases. Holding data in a wordprocessor format is at best proprietary, whilst databases do not have good facilities for structured text. Thus in a conventional “publication”, the data and its textual description are often separated. In the WWW context this often appears frustrating because one or other of the components are not on free public access, or in a form not easily associated with the other. In databases we cannot refer to the “full-text” of the article the data relates to. In full-text journals, the “data” are often missing, relegated to supplemental information or expressed as scanned images of pages. A key aspect of XML is that it allows conventional “documents” and “data” to be seamlessly integrated into a single XML document instance. Thus:
