XML and the importance of being an object

Recently, the Web consortium released the XML Schema specification, which is an elegant and powerful way of expressing an XML data instance's general object structure. Schema essentially replace data-type definitions and uses an XML syntax to specify object structure. For those familiar with object-oriented languages such as Java, Schema plays a similar role to classes. The sophisticated data structures XML allows are helpful in expressing information in many fields, and many communities developing XML-based standards are exploiting the object structures.