XML

XML

Filename extension	.xml
Internet media type	application/xml text/xml
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)	public.xml
UTI conformation	public.text
Developed by	World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format	Markup language
Extended from	SGML
Extended to	Numerous, including: XHTML, RSS, Atom, KML
Standard	1.0 (Fifth Edition) November 26, 2008; 17 years ago (2008-11-26) 1.1 (Second Edition) August 16, 2006; 20 years ago (2006-08-16)
Open format?	Yes

The Extensible Markup Language (XML for short) is a markup language like HTML, but built to be extensible, and was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML defines rules for the construction of a document. XML adds context to the information in a document. It does not say how this should be displayed.

Some programs get information out of an XML-document. To do that, they need an API. There are many APIs for XML. JSON was built to replace this purpose of XML.

You can write a description of an XML document in a way that is useful for programmers. There are several languages for this; the best known is called DTD.

Syntax

XML uses less than (<) and greater than (>) to show tags. For example, a paragraph in HTML would be <p>.

A closing tag is a tag used to enclose the value of the tag. The tag has a slash (/) before its name. For example, </p>

A tag which is empty can be represented as an opening tag but with a slash before the >. For example, <p/> (or <p />)

The XML specification defines a valid XML document as a well-formed XML document which also conforms to the rules of a Document Type Definition (DTD).

Languages

The following languages are based on XML.

Sources

Other websites

• XeML.net Archived 2018-03-16 at the Wayback Machine
• W3C XML Page

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