XML has been drawing more and more attention during recent years. In fact, in the new PHP version, PHP 5, XML support has been completely revamped and is now based on the libraries libxml2 and libxsl, which implement the W3C standards and recommendations in nearly every aspect.
But XML is not only hype; there are several applications where XML is definitely the best choice. If you need to store hierarchical data structures, such as the structure and contents of a page in a content management system, XML is perfectly suited for the job. But a content management system is not the only application where XML comes in handy. Even if you develop a smaller application, you can use XML for your configuration files. This way they are more flexible and can more easily be extended if new features are added. An XML document does not only contain key/value pairs like a standard INI configuration; the values are always related to a context through their position in the XML...