Introduction

This article explains in a very simple manner how you can use XML in ASP and VB. Since the inception of XML people many developers have wondered why we need XML... How is it better than HTML? For starters, XML is far more powerful than HTML, and that power resides in the "X" in XML (which stands for "eXtensible"). Rather than providing a set of pre-defined tags, as in the case of HTML, XML specifies the standards with which you can define your own markup languages with their own sets of tags. XML is therefore a meta-markup language, allowing you to define an infinite number of markup languages based upon the standards defined by XML.

XML was created so that richly structured documents could be used over the web. The only viable alternatives, HTML and SGML, are not practical for this purpose. XML allows you to define all sorts of tags with all sorts of rules, such as tags representing business rules or tags representing data description or data relationships