What is XML?

Answer 1

XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language.

XML is designed to describe data and to focus on what data is.

What is XML?

* XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language
* XML is a markup language much like HTML
* XML was designed to describe data
* XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags
* XML uses a Document Type Definition (DTD) or an XML Schema to describe the data
* XML with a DTD or XML Schema is designed to be self-descriptive
* XML is a W3C Recommendation

Answer 2

The first poster nailed it. XML is quickly becoming the industry standard for word processing documents; the major switch made in Word 2007 is that all the documents are now XML-based.

Answer 3

----------------
XML
----------------

(EXtensible Markup Language) An open standard for describing data from the W3C. It is used for defining data elements on a Web page and business-to-business documents. XML uses a similar tag structure as HTML; however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. While HTML uses predefined tags, XML allows tags to be defined by the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items, such as "product," "sales rep" and "amount due," can be identified, allowing Web pages to function like database records. By providing a common method for identifying data, XML supports business-to-business transactions and has become "the" format for electronic data interchange and Web services (see XML vocabulary, Web services, SOA and EDI).

XML Is Only a Format

Since its introduction in 1998, XML has been hyped as the panacea to e-commerce, but it was only the first step. The human-readable XML tags provide a simple data format, but the intelligent defining of these tags to serve business needs properly and everyone's adherence to using the same tags determines the real value of XML. Countless vocabularies have been developed for vertical applications; so many in fact, that a universal language was developed to provide a standard for interoperability between them (see UBL).

XML Documents Can Define Themselves

An XML document is self defining if an XML schema is included in it. Schemas, such as W3C XML Schema, are written in XML and identify the tags and their relationships to each other in the document.

More Rigid than HTML

Unlike HTML, which uses a rather loose coding style and which is tolerant of coding errors, XML pages have to be "well formed," which means they must comply with rigid rules. See XSLT, XML schema, DTD, DOM, XHTML, HTML, SGML, SMIL and XML-RPC.

XML and HTML Tags
Following are examples of XML and HTML tags. Note that the XML statements define data content, whereas the HTML lines deal with fonts and display (boldface). XML defines "what it is," and HTML defines "how it looks."


XML
Maria
Roberts
10-29-52

HTML
Maria Roberts
October 29, 1952

For More:
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=XML&gwp=13

Answer 4

XML stands for "Extensible Markup Language".

It is a markup language, similar to HTML, but is used for more than just web pages. It is also is used for RSS feeds, and is normally used to contain various amounts of data. For instance, if I wanted a list of employees, the XML document would look something like this:



Bill
300


Alex,/name>
200