This Course is designed to compliment the previous Courses offered by the Imperial Weapons and Tactics School. It is suggested that you have previously taken the offered Courses of HTML and VBScript before progressing to this Course, but it is not required.

XML is a markup language that allows an user to aggregate data into an easily readable structure. This structure is similar to a hierarchical database in its organization, thus can be easily read and interpreted by a multitude of programming languages (PHP, ASP, Java, C++, C#, and almost any other language that can parse a file). Or, to put it bluntly: XML is a language that describes data in a way that is easily worked with by other programming languages :)

It is important to understand that XML is not a replacement for HTML. Since its inception XML has become a moving force in data transfer between applications. Coupled with databases, this technology is a powerful tool. On the web, however, XML can't/shouldn't stand alone as it is merely a description of the data it contains; HTML is needed to format and display that data.