• 
  
  Those developers that are familiar with HTML will recognise syntax used in XML, however XML describes the data better than HTML.
  
  

Similarities with HTML:

• 
  
  Firewalls do not need to be reconfigured
  
  


• 
  
  Known system for security (same web server, firewall, protocols).
  
  

Differences between XML and HTML:

• 
  
  XML is a standard for data interchange
  
  


• 
  
  HTML has a fixed set of tags, whereas XML allows you to define your own custom tags.
  
  


• 
  
  HTML was designed for rendering information from computer to human.
  
  


• 
  
  XML has a large overhead in tags used to define the document elements.
  
  

To see how XML separates data from the presentation format, the following example is provided.

HTML 

<b> visualbuilder.com webmaster@visualbuilder.com </b> 

After reading the HTML displayed above, you can see that it is not exactly clear what is being displayed. We can guess that it is a web site and an email address. A computer program will have great difficultly understanding what this text is in a reliable way.



Below is XML equivalent to represent the same text and data 

XML 

<site> 
<sitename>visualbuilder.com</sitename> 
<emailaddress>webmaster@visualbuilder.com</emailaddress> 
</site> 

You can figure out what this means, but the main reason is that the computer program can make use of it. XML takes more space but it defines the information more precisely and robustly.