As the popularity of XML has grown, its usage has spread to every nook and cranny of software application development. This is due to the fact that, unlike previous data formats, XML can easily represent both rigid, highly structured data (such as relational data from a database, program configuration files, or spreadsheets) and semi-structured data (such as a Web page or business document). Besides being able to represent both structured and semi-structured data, XML has a number of characteristics that have caused it to be widely adopted as a data representation format. XML is extensible, platform-independent, and supports internationalization by being fully Unicode compliant. The fact that XML is a text-based format means that when the need arises, one can read and edit XML documents using standard text-editing tools. This has led to the widespread adoption of XML as the lingua franca of information interchange.
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