Summary

• Although it is not as fast or small as binary formats, XML's ease of distribution has made it a very widespread format that is pretty much ubiquitous at the enterprise and public sector level.

• Basic use of XML is possible with the SimpleXML extension to PHP, but you can take that much further by using both the tree-based extension and the event-based extension - both offer more flexibility.

• XSLT support in PHP is excellent, and the technology allows you to manipulate XML in some very cool ways - we even managed to convert XML directly into SQL.

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