* [World Wide Web Consortium XML homepage] |
A powerful adjunct to XML is the stylesheet language XSL, which allows users to describe visual properties and transformations of XML data without embedding those instructions into the data itself.
Before the advent of XML software designers had to define special file formats or small languages to share data between programs. This required writing detailed specifications and special purpose parsers and writers. Now the software designer needs only specify a DTD (which determines constraints on the structure of an XML document) and can use readily available (and free) XML parsers and writers. This significantly reduces life-cycle development cost.
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