Filename extension | .xml |
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Internet media type |
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Uniform Type Identifier (UTI) | public.xml |
UTI conformation | public.text |
Developed by | World Wide Web Consortium |
Type of format | Markup language |
Extended from | SGML |
Extended to |
|
Standard |
|
Open format? | Yes |
Status | Published |
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Year started | 1996 |
Editors |
|
Related standards | XML Schema |
Domain | Data serialization |
Abbreviation | XML |
Website | XML 1.0 |
In computing, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The W3C's XML 1.0 Specification 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.
Hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, SVG, and XHTML. XML-based formats have become the default for many office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office (Office Open XML), OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice (OpenDocument), and Apple's iWork. XML has also provided the base language for such as . Applications for the Microsoft .NET Framework use XML files for configuration. Apple has an implementation of a registry based on XML.