Help:What is XML

Introduction

XML, short for eXtensible Markup Language, is a markup language created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML itself is just a format that does nothing on its own. It is used to structure and describe data, much like HTML does for web pages, and great for exchanging, sharing and storing data.. But unlike HTML, there are no predefined tags in XML, you rather have to define your own. You can encode the information of your documents (data) precisely and then access and use it in programs that you develop. Since everything is encoded in plain text, it's possible to make the data accessible and comprehensible for machines and humans alike.

Examples

Here is a basic example how data encoded in XML may look like:

<car>
  <brand>Volvo</brand>
  <color>green</color>
  <license_plate>California 726 YXQ</license_plate>
</car>

Here's a more abstract example showing how text and elements may be mixed:

<element>
  text 1
  <child_element>
    text 2
  </child_element>
</element>

Tags may have attributes or even not contain anything at all:

<book title="What is XML">
  <cover/>
  <chapter title="Introduction">
  ...
  </chapter>
</book>

TODO: Link to CoCoAXML document

Further information

You may want to go here next to learn more about XML:

• http://www.w3schools.com/xml/
• http://www.xmlnews.org/docs/xml-basics.html