Enter XML Schema, which was elevated to Recommendation status by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for XML) in 2001, meaning that it's recommended for general use.

Though XML Schema powerfully expresses an XML document's structure ... which we will use to validate the XML, then W3C DOM (Document Object Model) ... This API turns XML into Java objects on the fly.

The Document Object Model (DOM) is the oldest, and arguably the easiest, method of working with generalized XML documents. Microsoft’s XML Core Services 4.0 (MSXML2) provides a competent DOM ...