Filename Extension: Public - XML
Filename Extension: Public - XML
The Extensible Markup Language (short XML) is a markup language like HTML but is
extensible. It's 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.
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.
XML
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 />
APPLICATIONS
The essence of why extensible markup languages are necessary is explained at Markup
language (for example, see Markup language § XML) and at Standard Generalized Markup
Language.
Hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS,
Atom, SOAP, SVG, and XHTML. XML-based formats have become the default for many
office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office (Office Open XML), OpenOffice.org
and LibreOffice (Open Document), and Apple's iWork .XML has also provided the base
language for communication protocols such as XMPP. Applications for the Microsoft .NET
Framework use XML files for configuration, and property lists are an implementation of
configuration storage built on XML.
Many industry data standards, e.g. HL7, OTA, FpML, MISMO, NIEM, etc. are based on
XML and the rich features of the XML schema specification. Many of these standards are
quite complex and it is not uncommon for a specification to comprise several thousand pages.
In publishing, DITA is an XML industry data standard. XML is used extensively to underpin
various publishing formats.
XML has come into common use for the interchange of data over the Internet. IETF RFC:
3023, now superseded by RFC: 7303, gave rules for the construction of Internet Media Types
for use when sending XML. It also defines the media types application/xml and text/xml,
which say only that the data is in XML, and nothing about its semantics.
RFC 7303 also recommends that XML-based languages be given media types ending in
+xml; for example image/svg+xml for SVG.
Further guidelines for the use of XML in a networked context appear in RFC 3470, also
known as IETF BCP 70, a document covering many aspects of designing and deploying an
XML-based language.
In XML, most of the resources like images or graphs are fetched and utilized in the files or
by using different views.