XML Applicability to Network Management

XML is a useful management tool, and some network equipment vendors support only XML and their proprietary CLI. XML lends itself to the easy development of Web-based management applications that can read and write network confi guration information from and to remote devices.

It is relatively simple to use a DTD to generate the screens that an application will display, and this is an important point since each vendor's device managed through XML is likely to have a different DTD even if the function of the devices is similar.

XML is, however, a comparatively verbose way of encoding data. The tags are usually descriptive, meaning that several text words may be used to encapsulate a single piece of data. This is a large overhead compared with a binary encoding of a known structure, but it is also a great strength because the format and meaning are encoded in XML in a way that can be simply parsed by the recipient. The overhead of XML encoding is overcome to some extent by compression algorithms built into the protocols used to transfer XML documents.