As a systems administrator, you often need to store and manage data. For example, you might want to store information about all the servers you manage—their names, the settings that apply to each of them, characteristics of users that can connect to the servers. Whatever the nature of the information, your goal should be to store and read it as effectively as possible.
For a long time, plaintext files were the only significant alternative to human memory. In the past couple of years, though, we've observed the incredible success of XML. In this column, I start a tour of XML's main features. In particular, I guide you through the forest of XML nodes and head toward what really is of interest to you as a systems administrator: the ability to properly manage structured and less-structured information.
What XML Is All About
XML files are, first of all, plaintext files—that is, the data in .xml files is in ASCII text format. XML is simply a metalanguage that defines rules for formatting words within any text file saved with an .xml extension. XML is also a markup language that offers tags that identify certain chunks of information that have a specific meaning. . . .
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