Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language created to structure, store, and transport data by defining a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards.
The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability over the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, for example in web services.
Many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been developed to aid software developers with processing XML data, and several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages.
As of 2009, hundreds of XML-based languages have been developed, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, 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 been employed as the base language for communication protocols, such as XMPP.
Read more about XML: Key Terminology, Characters and Escaping, Well-formedness and Error-handling, Schemas and Validation, Related Specifications, Use On The Internet, Programming Interfaces, History, Criticism
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... XML and its extensions have regularly been criticized for verbosity and complexity ... Mapping the basic tree model of XML to type systems of programming languages or databases can be difficult, especially when XML is used for exchanging highly structured ... criticisms attempt to refute the claim that XML is a self-describing language (though the XML specification itself makes no such claim) ...
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... The Office Open XML format (OOXML), is an open and free document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos ... The following tables list applications supporting a version of the Office Open XML standard (ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 295002008) ...