XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary 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.
| Extensible Markup Language | |
| Abbreviation | XML |
|---|---|
| Status | Published, W3C recommendation |
| Year started | 1996 |
| First published | February 10, 1998 |
| Latest version | 1.1 (2nd ed.) September 29, 2006 |
| Organization | World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) |
| Editors | Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Eve Maler, François Yergeau, John W. Cowan |
| Base standards | SGML |
| Related standards | W3C XML Schema |
| Domain | Serialization |
| Website | www |
| Filename extension |
.xml |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | application/xml, text/xml |
| Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | public.xml |
| UTI conformation | public.text |
| Magic number | <?xml |
| Developed by | World Wide Web Consortium |
| Type of format | Markup language |
| Extended from | SGML |
| Extended to | Numerous languages, including XHTML, RSS, Atom, and KML |
| Standard |
|
| Open format? | Yes |
| Free format? | Yes |
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.
Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid the processing of XML data.