When you are working with Microsoft-based systems, there is a high probability that you are leveraging eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for data and communications. XML was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to standardize the encoding of documents to make them both legible to humans and usable by computer systems. XML's format is very similar to that of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). If you know the basics of HTML, you should be able to pick up XML pretty quickly. While the syntax is very similar between HTML and XML, the purposes of these languages are very different. HTML is used by web browsers to render objects and text on a website. XML is used to encapsulate data to be stored on a system, or passed between systems.
In this chapter, we will learn about:
The XML file structure
Reading XML files
Adding XML content
Modifying XML content
Removing XML content