What Is XML?
Most people might be able to tell you that HTML is the language used to create websites, but the better answer is that websites are created with a combination of many different languages and tools, the most common being HTML (to handle a website's appearance), CSS (to style that appearance), PHP (a server-side language that can do what HTML can't) and MySQL (to create databases). XML is another one of these tools.
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Identification
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XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language.
Purpose
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XML provides a readable syntax to pass data around to different websites, computers and applications.
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Appearance
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Whereas HTML has a predetermined set of "tags" for formatting things such as a paragraph (by surrounding the paragraph text in <p> and </p>) or making a header (by surrounding the header text in <h1> and </h1>), in XML you can create your own tags to classify things however you want. For example: <question>What is XML?</question>
Description
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XML is not so much a language as a specification: it allows people to create their own markup languages.
History
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The first working draft of XML in use was created in November, 1996. The World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) officially gave XML their recommendation on February 10th, 1998.
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