What is "xml"

Wikipedia XML defines as follows:

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a set of rules for the coding of documents in human and machine readable form. It is defined in the XML Specification 1.0 produced by W3C, and several other related specifications, all open standards free.

In short, XML is:

• Designed for data transport and storage, and
• A flexible SGML derived text format (ISO 8879).

The goals of the XML project is to emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the XML project focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, for example in web services.

Many application programming interfaces (Apis) have been developed to help software developers with XML data processing, and there are several schema systems to assist in defining XML-based languages.

Resources

The following links provide additional information to learn about XML:

• Introduction to XML
• XML specification
• Namespaces XML
• IBM XML material
• Collection of XML resources