XML basics

XML is a standard way to represent categorized data into a tree structure similar to HTML documents. XML is written in plain-text format, and hence it is very easy to read, write, and manipulate its data.

A typical XML document looks like this:

<book>
<title>Flex 3 with Java</title>
<author>Satish Kore</author>
<publisher>Packt Publishing</publisher>
<pages>300</pages>
</book>

Generally, XML data is known as XML documents and it is represented by tags wrapped in angle brackets (<>). These tags are also known as XML elements. Every XML document starts with a single top-level element known as the root element. Each element is distinguished by a set of tags known as the opening tag and the closing tag. In the previous XML document,<book> is the opening tag and</book> is the closing tag. If an element contains no content, it can be written as an empty statement (also called self-closing statement). For example...