What is XML?

A frequently asked question is - what is XML? So often you run across a programming or technical article with abbreviations or acronyms like XML, api, asp, en, rss, svg, css or don and you've really got to wonder what they all mean and why the editor doesn't think its good business to include important, basic examples.

You may feel like you need a doctorate level, server directory of foreign languages to understand solutions to authoring, platform, programming, and framework issues found in an article library.



XML stands for extensible markup language which is an authoring tool for building documents and websites that makes it easy to exchange data over the internet. XML is a metalanguage designed to simplify implementation of elements in the main webpage architecture or in documents. The World Wide Web consortium recognizes HML as a formal specification. Thus, it is a core element for a system programming platform that aims to produce a doctype that's search engine friendly. Users of XML find processing and validation to be easy.

XML and HTML have recently been combined to produce XHTML which is a more modern programming language for the web. The basic components of XHTML are HTML which displays data and XML which describes data. The use of both, in the form of XHTML, diminishes the level of events where a browser would have difficulty interpreting an element in a tag. Xpath is a language that assists in searching an XML document for specific XML schemas and elements.