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.

Identification

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language.

Purpose

XML provides a readable syntax to pass data around to different websites, computers and applications.

Appearance

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

XML is not so much a language as a specification: it allows people to create their own markup languages.

History

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.