XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a powerful markup language providing functionality for data exchange and sharing. By using XML, we separate data from representation. It means that data in XML format can be displayed in many forms. Each software developer can decide how display this data, related to his own requirements.
For example European Central Bank (ECB) is publishing exchange rates on their website in XML format (http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml), these rates are updated on daily base. Developers are free to access these rates and implement them into websites or applications. Developers can also select only currencies which are important for their countries. One example from my country using these ECB XML exchange rates is http://www.zoz.sk. You can see exchange rates of important currencies in my country on the right side. Developer of this site chooses his own graphical representation of data provided by ECB.
The next example of service provided by XML is weather forecast. You can get current weather in RSS format (RSS is written in XML language). For example, here is the forecast for Bratislava (city in Slovakia) http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=818717&u=c. You can transform this XML information to required graphical format. The example is on bottom of http://www.zoz.sk. Related to weather code provided by http://weather.yahooapis.com the icon of actual weather is changing.
Last example is related to government taxes in my country. There is a lot of different accountant software, but each of them is able to export required documents to XML format. These documents can be sent to tax authorities of my country, and they can process them automatically.
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML
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