Accessing and Manipulating XML Data in Microsoft .NET Framework

XML data comprises of both human-readable data and descriptions of that data, and contains text-based XML files. An example of a well-formed XML document has been described as under:

An XML document is a well-formed text-based data and considered as a meta-language that can easily be edited and created with any text editor. Specific rules should be followed while writing XML document.

·XML describes document structures using markup tags '<' and '>'.

·The line "<? xml version = "1.0" encoding ="UTF-8" ?>" is an XML declaration line which is optional. This line denotes the XML specification of W3C, and uses the UTF-8 standard set of characters.

·The line starting with '<?' string and ending with '?>' string is called processing instruction that provides information to the application about the process of XML document.

·A well-formed XML document should contain a start tag and an end tag. For example, '<Students>' is a start tag that contains an end tag '</Students>'. Unlike HTML tags, XML tags are case-sensitive. For example, if a start tag is written as '<StudentID>', its corresponding end tag should be written as '</StudentID>', and not as '</studentid>' or '</STUDENTID> .

·Unlike HTML, XML document has no predefined elements and attributes, but is specified according to the application or business requirements.

An XML document contains an associated document type definition (DTD) or an XML schema. An XML schema describes the data and the relationship between the data within an XML document. Unlike an XML document, an XML schema describes the elements and attributes of an XML document including type information, and also validates XML documents.