5 Advantages and Disadvantages of XML

Introduction : XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a widely used format for storing and exchanging structured data across different platforms and systems. Its ability to represent complex data hierarchies in a human-readable and machine-readable format makes it a powerful tool in web services, data sharing, and configuration files. However, despite its versatility, XML has some limitations that impact its performance and usability in certain scenarios. Let us explore benefits and drawbacks of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) in various applications.

XML Features:

• It has been designed to transport and store data with emphasis on “what data is.” XML is all about carrying information.
• XML provides a framework to define markup languages.
• XML is neither a programming language nor a presentation language.
• XML is case-sensitive. Hence, utmost care is needed when writing XML scripts.
• It helps in transporting data between applications and databases.
• XML allows custom tag creation and use as desired, and hence it is more flexible.
• XML preserves whitespace.
• XML is dynamic in nature as it carries information.
• XML is recommended by the WWW consortium. It is a fee-free, open standard.

• Figure-1 depicts an XML script example.
• XML defines a set of rules or syntax that can encode documents in such a way that they can be readable by machines.
• XML helps in opening documents in a browser.

Advantages of XML

Following are some of the benefits of XML.

1. It is text-based and hence human-readable.
2. It supports the Unicode standard, and hence text from any character set can be used.
3. XML can store binary information. The binary data must be converted to text with the help of “Base64”.
4. XML will store any document or data that can be represented as a “tree structure”.
5. It allows business documents to be viewed in a browser.
6. XML is platform-independent.
7. XBRL (version of XML) is recommended by the United States SEC for reporting financial earnings to the US federal government.
8. It can be used by small EDI users who do not have the resources to implement a full-blown EDI installation.

Disadvantages of XML

Following are some of the drawbacks of XML.

1. XML is relatively inefficient compared to other storage algorithms. This is due to the use of XML tags, which require extra storage or bandwidth.
2. Storage of binary data such as image data is also inefficient. Storage is done using Base64 encoding, which takes 4 bytes to store 3 bytes of binary data. Hence, it consumes more storage/bandwidth.
3. An additional program is needed to display encoded image data written in XML.
4. There are three methods to parse XML files. Most programmers are not aware of these methods.
5. XML requires a separate XML stylesheet to use it for more than basic display of data.
6. XML is a backend technology for data storage and transmission. It lacks rendering instructions.
7. Not all files are well-represented with tree structures. Examples include DB2/400 tables, flat files, undefined fixed record length files, stream files, etc.
8. File sizes are very large.
9. Application bridges, i.e., APIs, must be rewritten.

Conclusion: XML offers key benefits such as platform independence, extensibility and readability, making it suitable for diverse data exchange and integration tasks. Nonetheless, it can be verbose, slower to process, and more complex compared to modern alternatives like JSON. Choosing XML should depend on the specific requirements of the application, especially when interoperability and data structure flexibility are critical.