What Should XML Be Used For?
XML is being enthusiastically embraced in many application domains because a lot of applications need to store data intended for human use, but will also be useful to manipulate by machine. One example might be storing and displaying mailing list information. Defining and using an XML DTD for storing address data makes it comparatively easy to write applications to (say) generate address labels without inadvertently printing the phone number in the postcode field. There are a large number of initiatives to replace home-grown markup formats with applications of XML examples include Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language (BSML), Weather Observation Markup Format (OMF), the Extensible Log Format (XLF a markup format for logging information generated by Web servers) and others for legal documents and real estate information, and many more. In each case the working group simply needs to define a DTD that defines the tags and how they can be legally combined. These DTDs can then be used
