My wife is a writer, which today means she uses a word processing program. It's a sophisticated, powerful program—OpenOffice.org Writer—but occasionally it won't do something that she wants it to do.

Applications frequently need to store persistent data, and the format for saving can be any format conceivable by the developer. However, each time a new application is written, the set of tools for ...

Figure 3. Big XML files. Click on thumbnail to view full-sized image. Eight years since its inception, XML has already taken off as an open, semi-structured data format for storing data as well as ...