Extending Your Markup: An XML Tutorial

(André Bergholz) By now, no doubt, you’ve heard the acronym XML. You’ve probably also heard that XML (a) is simple and (b) will solve all your problems. Sounds like magic, doesn’t it? But then you look a little deeper and encounter more three-letter acronyms, like DTD, XSL, RDF, and DOM. You begin to doubt XML’s simplicity (and you never believed XML could solve all your problems in the first place). In this short tutorial I present what I think are the
essential concepts of XML, and hopefully will convince
you that despite the hype, XML is important for presentation, exchange, and management of information.
(pdf)