Difference Between XML and HTML
EXtensible Markup Language is referred to as XML. A specification for XML 1.0 has been developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The XML format provides a standard way to encode data and text for use across driver hardware, operating systems, and applications with minimal human intervention. A leading markup language for web pages is HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the basic building block of a web page. The web browser interprets the HTML document and compiles it into a visual or audible web page.
XML
XML is a markup language used to transfer data and text between driver hardware, operating systems, and applications without the need for human intervention. It is possible to provide context information using XML tags, attributes, and element structures. It is possible to decode the meaning of the content using this context information. As a result, efficient search engines can be developed and data mining can be performed on the data.
Furthermore, traditional relational databases are suitable for storing XML data since they can be organized in rows and columns, however, XML does not provide sufficient support for data with rich content, such as audio, video, and complex documents. It is possible to process queries more efficiently in XML databases because they store data in a structured, hierarchical format. The XML tags are not predefined and the users are free to define their own tags and document structures. In addition, XML was used to create new internet languages such as RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTM.
HTML
As mentioned earlier, HTML is a markup language that consists of a set of markup tags. Web pages are described using HTML markup tags, which are usually called HTML tags. HTML documents typically contain HTML tags as well as plain text required for the content of web pages. It is easy to identify HTML tags in a HTML document since they are surrounded by angle brackets (e.g. <HTML>). As a rule, HTML tags are inserted in pairs, where the first tag is the start tag (e.g. ) and the second tag is the end tag (e.g. ).
A web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) displays HTML documents as web pages. The browser interprets the HTML tags to determine the content of the page, but does not display the tags themselves. Images, objects, and scripts written in languages like JavaScript can be embedded in HTML pages. HTML can also be used to create interactive forms.
Difference between XML and HTML
Although XML and HTML are both markup languages, there are some fundamental differences between them. XML tags typically define the structure and the content of data, while HTML tags define the appearance of the content (and the actual appearance is determined by the associated style sheet). Further, XML tags can be defined by the user for a specific application, as opposed to HTML tags, which are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.
