8. EAI and XML

XML [H 7 148] was originally designed to publish data on the Web. Initially, this was done using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) for the transport layer and HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for data and presentation. Data and presentation were mixed, even since the availability of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).

Faced with the ever-increasing need to manage large volumes of complex data, the search for a universal data format led to the choice of XML. More general than HTML, and simpler than SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), the historical document description specialist, XML provides...