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Concept
XML
Summary
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.
The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services.
Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid the processing of XML data.
The main purpose of XML is serialization, i.e. storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. For two disparate systems to exchange information, they need to agree upon a file format. XML standardizes this process. It is therefore analogous to a lingua franca for representing information.
As a markup language, XML labels, categorizes, and structurally organizes information. XML tags represent the data structure and contain metadata. What's within the tags is data, encoded in the way the XML standard specifies. An additional XML schema (XSD) defines the necessary metadata for interpreting and validating XML. (This is also referred to as the canonical schema.) An XML document that adheres to basic XML rules is "well-formed"; one that adheres to its schema is "valid."
IETF RFC 7303 (which supersedes the older RFC 3023), provides rules for the construction of media types for use in XML message. It defines three media types: application/xml (text/xml is an alias), application/xml-external-parsed-entity (text/xml-external-parsed-entity is an alias) and application/xml-dtd.
Official source
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