Thanks to Maulin for the link to the simple XML explanation site.
Points that stuck out to me:
+ XML is a markup specification language with which you can design ways of describing information (text or data), usually for storage, transmission, or processing by a program: it says nothing about what you should do with the data (although your choice of element names may hint at what they are for):
+ XML is not a programming language, so XML files don't `run' or `execute' . XML is a markup specification language and XML files are data: they just sit there until you run a program which displays them (like a browser) or does some work with them (like a converter which writes the data in another format, or a database which reads the data), or modifies them (like an editor).
+ Users from a database or computer science background should be aware that XML is not a database management system: it is a text markup system. While there are many similarities, some of the concepts of one are simply non-existent in the other: XML does not possess some database-like features in the same way that databases do not possess markup-like ones. It is a common error to believe that XML is a DBMS like Oracle or Access and therefore possesses the same facilities. It doesn't.
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