About XML
XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a markup language. Markup languages clarify
the content in a document by tagging the elements of the document. A well-known
markup language is HTML, the standard language for writing webpages. The benefit of
working with XML is that it is an open standard. The structure and rules for working
with XML documents are well documented by the World Wide Web Consortium
(
http://www.w3c.org
). XML is also quite simple and human-readable: you can view an
XML file in any text editing application and even edit its content. Because XML is an
open standard, anyone with sufficient understanding can process an XML document
into other formats, such as plain text, HTML, or even other XML formats.