There are many applications in the computer industry, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Users today have the opportunity to choose whichever application best suits the need for their particular tasks. However, because users tend to share data between their separate applications, they are continually faced with the problem of replicating, transforming, exporting, or saving their data as a different format that can be imported into another application. This can be a critical problem in business applications because many of these transforming processes tend to drop some of the data, or they require at least that users go through the tedious process of ensuring that data is consistent. This consumes both time and money.
Today, one of the ways to address this problem is for application developers to write Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) applications to save the data into a database management system. From there, the data can be manipulated and presented in the form in which it is needed for another application. Database applications need to be written to convert the data into a form that an application requires, however applications change quickly and become out of date. Applications that convert data to HTML provide presentation solutions, but the data presented cannot be practically used for other purposes. If there were another method that separated data from presentation, this method could be used as a practical form of interchange between applications.
XML has emerged to address this problem. XML is an acronym for eXtensible Markup Language. It is extensible in that the language itself is a metalanguage that allows you to create your own language depending on the needs of your enterprise. You use XML to capture not only the data for your particular application, but also the data structure. XML is not the only interchange format. However, XML has emerged as the accepted standard for data interchange. By adhering to this standard, applications can finally share data without needing to transform data using proprietary formats.