In the last few years, XML has received great media attention, and most languages support the parsing and extraction of data from XML documents. Besides being a great three-letter anacronym to sprinkle on your resumé, XML is actually a useful data storage structure for PHP programmers.

Before you begin to use XML, you must first determine if your project really needs what XML offers. There are alternative data storage formats like fixed-width column files, tab-delimited files, CSV files, and database tables, but these formats typically can only manage a simple grid of rows and columns of data. XML provides several additional benefits for programmers including:

...but you already know that. What you want to do is use XML data inside your sparkling new web application. We'll explore one simple way to do this in the remainder of this article.