Question

Describe the disadvantages and advantages of the use of XML in web services (website design, mostly) in 200-300 words.

Answer 1

Advantages of XML

1. XML is platform independent and programming language independent, thus it can be used on any system and supports the technology change when that happens.

2. XML supports unicode. Unicode is an international encoding standard for use with different languages and scripts, by which each letter, digit, or symbol is assigned a unique numeric value that applies across different platforms and programs. This feature allows XML to transmit any information written in any human language.

3. The data stored and transported using XML can be changed at any point of time without affecting the data presentation. Generally other markup language such as HTML is used for data presentation, HTML gets the data from XML and display it on the GUI (graphical user interface), once data is updated in XML, it does reflect in HTML without making any change in HTML GUI.

4. XML allows validation using DTD and Schema. This validation ensures that the XML document is free from any syntax error.

5. XML simplifies data sharing between various systems because of its platform independent nature. XML data doesn’t require any conversion when transferred between different systems.

Disadvantages of XML

1. XML syntax is verbose and redundant compared to other text-based data transmission formats such as JSON.

2. The redundancy in syntax of XML causes higher storage and transportation cost when the volume of data is large.

3. XML document is less readable compared to other text-based data transmission formats such as JSON.

4. XML doesn’t support array.

5. XML file sizes are usually very large due to its verbose nature, it is totally dependant on who is writing it.