Networking and the Internet: XML

HTML is essentially a notational system by which a text document along with the document’s appearance can be encoded as a simple text file. Similarly, we can also encode non-textual material as text files e.g sheet music. At first glance, the pattern of staff, measure bars, and notes in which music is traditionally represented does not confirm the character-by-character format dictated by the text files. However, we can overcome this problem by developing an alternative notation system. More precisely, we could agree to represent the start of a staff by the end of the staff by a time signature with the form 2/4 the beginning and ending of a measure by and respectively, a note such as an eighth note on as length C and so on. Then the text C minor 2/4 egth egth G, egth G, egth G half E using such notations, sheet music could be encoded, modified, stored, and transformed over the internet as text files. Moreover, the software could be written to present the contents of such files in the form of traditional sheet music or even to play the music on a synthesizer. Note that our sheet music encoding system encompasses the same style used by HTML. We chose to delineate the tags that identify components by the symbol. We chose to indicate the beginning and end structure by the tags of the same name. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a standardized style for designing notational systems for representing data as text files. Following the XML standards, notational systems called markup language have been developed for representing mathematics, multimedia presentations, and music. HTML is the markup language based on the XML standard that was developed for representing webpages. (Actually, the original version of HTML was developed before the XML standard was solidified, and therefore some features of HTML do not strictly conform to XML. That is why you might see references to XHTML which is the version of HTML that rigorously adheres to XML ).