file extension XML

File extension XML description:

Extensible Markup Language file - Structured text file with various content for many programs. A human-readable, machine-understandable, general syntax for describing hierarchical data, applicable to a wide range of applications (databases, e-commerce, Java, web development, searching, etc.). Custom tags enable the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.
XML is a subset of SGML and is a metalanaguage providing the rules and conventions to be used to create other languages following these rules. These other languages are called XML-applications. There are thousands of XML-applications such as MathML (Mathematics Markup Language), CML (Chemical Markup Language), CDF, OSD, HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework), MML (Music Markup Language)

XML documents can be created with a text-editor just like HTML documents. XML, however, is much stricter with its rules. XML documents need to be well-formed (e.g. element names, i.e. tags, are case sensitive and must be ended, unlike HTML) and for data vailidity they also need to be valid (i.e. be associated with a DTD which contains definitions of and relationships between elements).

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.


Mime: text/xml
Mime: application/xml