XML: a lingua franca for science?

XML is a new language designed to solve one of the biggest problems of the World Wide Web: its main language, HTML, is not extensible. In this article, the authors discuss the current successes and limitations of the World Wide Web, briefly explain the basics of XML and present the benefits of using XML as a data-exchange language. Finally, they discuss real-life applications that have been developed using XML, with a focus on biology.