Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a flexible way to create common information formats and to share the formats and data between applications and on the internet.
XML is, essentially, a platform-independent means of structuring information.
An XML document is a tree of elements. An element may have a set of attributes , in the form of key-value pairs, and may contain other elements, text, or a mixture thereof.
An element may refer to other elements via identifier attributes or other types via type attributes, thereby allowing arbitrary graph structures to be represented.
An XML document need not follow any rules beyond the well-formedness criteria laid out in the XML 1.0 specification. To exchange documents in a meaningful way, however, requires that their structure and content be described and constrained so that the various parties involved will interpret them correctly and consistently. This can be accomplished through the use of a schema.
Mapping between XML elements and data structures is inherently flawed:
See json for a textual representation more suitable to data structures.
XML Operations | Language |
---|---|
transformation | XSLT |
format | XSL or XSL-FO |
navigation | XPath |