XML documents possess a strict phrase structure that makes it easy to find and access data. For instance, all elements must have both an opening tag and a corresponding closing tag:
<p> A paragraph.</p>.
XML lets you develop and use tags that distinguish different types of data, such as customer numbers or item numbers.
XML lets you create an application-specific document type, making it possible to distinguish one kind of document from another.
XML documents allow different displays of the XML data. XML documents, like HTML documents, contain only markup and content; they do not contain formatting instructions. Formatting instructions are normally provided on the client.
XML is less complex than SGML, but more complex and flexible than HTML. Although XML and HTML can usually be read by the same browsers and processors, certain XML characteristics enable it to share documents more efficiently that HTML.
You can store XML documents in Adaptive Server as:
Character data in columns of datatypes char, varchar, unichar, univarchar, text, unitext, java.lang.String, or image.
Parsed XML in an image column
