eXtensible Markup Language - (XML)

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is best described as a set of communication rules that simplify the way information is shared between software applications to enrich the viewing experience of humans. Initial designed to assist the complex communications within the electronic publishing industry, this World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard has now found its way into main stream web communications and data transfer.

At the Intelledox core is a native XML communications engine, designed to collect, merge, process and store client information which is gathered from a variety of data sources - interactive smart web forms, third party sources and other line-of-business applications - via web service portals. (Refer to WSDL). Intelledox is utilising the open nature of the XML standards the way that they were intended, by improving client communications.

How does XML work

Put simply XML is the structure and descriptors (Markup) that surrounds plain text information.

As an example let’s look at the follow paragraph in a normal readable text view:

Intelledox is a 4th generation document generation system that addresses “content chaos” caused by the lack of a centralized approach to document generation.

An XML view of this same paragraph would look like this:

<article>
         <statement> Intelledox is a 4th generation document generation system
                  that addresses< punctuation type =“double quote” /> content 
                  chaos< punctuation type =“double quote” />caused by the
                  lack of a centralized approach < punctuation type =“period” />
         </statement> 
</article>

The additional XML markups are in PURPLE for convenience, you can see that it is a very formal language that starts with a metatag <tag> and ends with another </tag>. Any characters that are not plain text - Double Quotes and Periods - have additional metatags that further describe the special character < Metatag type =“character” / > within the paragraph.

By following this simple set of XML rules information can pass easily between applications and not be limited in the way that this information is utilised in each application.

* Source: www.xml.com