Reflection and Evaluation of Technologies Such As XML and Flash - Lab Report Example

The text is always divided into a couple of noninteracting sets: markup, which are all the tags, comments, processing instructions, entity references, character references, CDATA section delimiters, XML declarations, text declarations, document type declarations, and white space outside the root element; and, character data which is consisted by the rest of elements in the XML document. (Harold 2003, p. xxi) Fundamentally, XML offers an excellent framework in structuring data, based on hierarchical representations and is capable to represent the structured, unstructured and semi structured data.

(Shen 2006, p. 112) Today, it is the standard used by W3C for document exchange over the Internet. In terms of explaining XML as an application, it is important to underscore that, fundamentally, the language was developed as some standard for information interchange on the Internet that is why it is essentially an application in itself. An interesting fact, however, was that XML is valued more as an element in another application or rather its derivatives such as Atom, Rich Site Summary (RSS), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), ebXML and XHTML, among others, can be integrated as an added value to an application.

RSS is an excellent example. RSS can enhance a website’s functionality by enabling the owner or site administrator to announce whatever changes made on the site as well as other information that may constitute marketing, promotions, public service announcements, and so forth. All in all, XML-based applications are platforms for easy documents management and data integration. As such, it allows publishers to tailor and structure documents in a simple way. It is also very popular owing to the fact that it is an industry standard as well as to the fact that the tools and resources for it are large, including numerous XML parsers, browsers and editors.

The language is being used across the globe, working well with the Internet and most of its applications. However, XML is weak on automated processing libraries as well as its ability in terms of verbosity, wherein documents are mainly in plain text and could include an overwhelming number of markup tags. In addition, the language can be difficult to learn as well. There is also no guarantee that XML can be the universal solution for data integration as well as in unifying formats because the language has its limitations as well.

In evaluating XML-based applications, it is important to return to the language’s objectives – it was designed for simple, fast and structured data integration and management. Therefore, these factors should be the main criteria in assessing its efficacy. Whether in measuring XML-based applications or XML-derivatives used as elements in other applications, evaluation must focus on performance: How a particular application retrieves, evaluates, modify data as well as how it conforms to industry standards, particularly in terms of structural aspects of XML documents.

Flash As the Internet and computing technology become more sophisticated day after day, their users’ experience becomes more enhanced, intuitive, sophisticated and simple. It is like information technology developers are in constant quest to develop rich content that are delivered in fast and simple ways. When in the