Bill H said:
I am a beginner programmer taking my first VB 6.0 class, please forgive me
if this question is foolish.
Question:
How is XML (Extensive Markup Language) a part of the .NET environment and is
it intended to replace HTML.
Whoever told you that XML would replace HTML? This is not true, over time
HTML will more and more be written using the more strict rules that XML
documents follow (case sensitive, all open tags have close tags, proper
nesting, etc.). When you write HTML this way, you are actually writting
XHTML.
HTML will probably be around for a long long time.
But, .NET uses XML quite a bit internally. Here are 3 of the big ways that
XML is used within the .NET Environment:
The ADO.NET "DataSet" object is essentially one big XML Schema and the
DataSet persists its data as XML natively.
Web Services are nothing more than remote procedure calls from one machine
to another. Now, that (in an of itself) is not a new concept, but web
services take a different approach. When machine A wants to invoke the
procedure from machine B, it does so by accessing an XML document on machine
B called the "Web Service Description Language" document. When machine B is
done with its processing and returns its answer to machine A, it send a
stream of XML as the result. Because of this XML going back and forth over
HTTP, another protocol called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) rides
along on top of HTTP to keep the XML "formatted" properly.
Lastly, because XML is such a great data-transport mechanism, .NET has many
classes in the System.XML namespace for reading, writing and working with
XML.
