Because XML data lends itself to a hierarchical structure rather than a relational structure, it may be difficult to store XML data in traditional relational database systems.

The W3C has published a first public working draft of XML Schema Patterns for Common Data Structures, a set of data types, structures and schema patterns to increase Web services interoperability.

After the prolog comes the content structure. XML is hierarchical, like a book—you know that in general books have titles and chapters, each of which contain paragraphs, and so forth.

XML structures vary widely in arrangement, complexity, and whether the data is held in content or attributes. A variation of this sample XML is used throughout this article.

The debate about JSON vs. XML as a data interchange format has begun in blogspace, following JSON inventor and architect at Yahoo Douglas Crockford's talk at XML 2006 JSON, the fat-free ...

That's where the Perl module called XML::Simple comes in. It takes away the drudgery of parsing XML data, making the process easier than you ever thought possible.

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