Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.
AI overview
XML is a standardized way to organize and format data so that both people and computers can easily read and understand it. It's widely used for storing and sharing information across the internet because it follows clear, consistent rules that anyone can access and use for free.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Technology standard.long_name
- Extensible Markup Language
- Technology standard.title
- XML (standard)
- Technology standard.image
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) logo.svg
- Technology standard.status
- Published, W3C recommendation
- Technology standard.editors
- Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Eve Maler, François Yergeau, John W. Cowan
- Technology standard.base_standards
- SGML
- Technology standard.related_standards
- W3C XML Schema
- Technology standard.abbreviation
- XML
- Technology standard.domain
- Serialization
- Technology standard.version
- 1.1 (2nd ed.)
- Technology standard.organization
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Article
38 sectionsContents
- Overview
- Applications
- Key terminology
- Characters and escaping
- Valid characters
- Encoding detection
- Escaping
- Comments
- International use
- Syntactical correctness and error-handling
- Schemas and validation
- Document type definition
- Schema
- RELAX NG
- Schematron
- DSDL and other schema languages
- Related specifications
- Programming interfaces
- Simple API for XML
- Pull parsing
- Document Object Model
- Data binding
- XML as data type
- History
- Sources
- Versions
- 1.0 and 1.1
- 2.0
- MicroXML
- Binary XML
- Criticism
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Citations
- Bibliography
- Further reading
- External links
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.
The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, such as those used in web services.