Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language that supports a wide variety of applications. XML languages or 'dialects' may be designed by anyone and may be processed by conforming software. XML is also designed to be reasonably human-legible, and to this end, terseness was not considered essential in its structure. XML is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Formally defined languages based on XML (such as RSS, GraphML, XHTML, Scalable Vector Graphics, MusicXML and thousands of other examples) allow diverse software to reliably understand information formatted and passed in these languages.

History

The versatility of SGML for dynamic information display was understood by early digital media publishers in the late 1980s prior to the rise of the Internet. By the mid-1990s some practitioners of SGML had gained experience with the then-new World Wide Web, and believed that SGML offered solutions to some of the problems the Web was likely to face as it grew. Dan Connolly added SGML to the list of W3C's activities when he joined the staff in 1995; work began in mid-1996 when Jon Bosak developed a charter and recruited collaborators. Bosak was well connected in the small community of people who had experience both in SGML and the Web. He received support in his efforts from Microsoft.

XML was designed by a working group of eleven members, supported by an (approximately) 150-member Interest Group. Technical debate took place on the Interest Group mailing list and issues were resolved by consensus or, when that failed, majority vote of the Working Group. The decision record was compiled by Michael Sperberg-McQueen on December 4th 1997. James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group, notably contributing the empty-element "<empty/>" syntax and the name "XML". Other names that had been put forward for consideration included "MAGMA" (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), "SLIM" (Structured Language for Internet Markup) and "MGML" (Minimal Generalized Markup Language). The co-editors of the specification were originally Tim Bray and Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Microsoft. Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as a third co-editor.

The XML Working Group never met face-to-face; the design was accomplished using a combination of email and weekly teleconferences. The major design decisions were reached in twenty weeks of intense work between July and November of 1996, when the first Working Draft of an XML specification was published. Further design work continued through 1997, and XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998.

XML 1.0 achieved the Working Group's goals of Internet usability, general-purpose usability, SGML compatibility, facilitation of easy development of processing software, minimization of optional features, legibility, formality, conciseness, and ease of authoring.

Clarifications and minor changes were accumulated in published errata and then incorporated into a Second Edition of the XML 1.0 Recommendation on October 6, 2000. Subsequent errata were incorporated into a Third Edition on February 4, 2004. Also published on the same day as XML 1.0 Third Edition was XML 1.1, a variant of XML that encourages more consistency in how characters are represented and relaxes restrictions on names, allowable characters, and end-of-line representations.

On August 16, 2006, XML 1.0 Fourth Edition and XML 1.1 Second edition were published to incorporate the accumulated errata. Both XML 1.0 Fourth Edition and XML 1.1 Second Edition are considered current versions of XML.

The features of XML

XML provides a text-based means to describe and apply a tree-based structure to information. At its base level, all information manifests as text, interspersed with markup that indicates the information's separation into a hierarchy of character data, container-like elements, and attributes of those elements. In this respect, it is similar to the LISP programming language's S-expressions, which describe tree structures wherein each node may have its own property list.

The fundamental unit in XML is the character, as defined by the Universal Character Set. Characters are combined to form an XML document. The document consists of one or more entities, each of which is typically some portion of the document's characters, stored in a text file.

XML files may be served with a variety of Media types. RFC 3023 defines the types "application/xml" and "text/xml", which say only that the data is in XML, and nothing about its semantics. The use of "text/xml" has been criticized as a potential source of encoding problems but is now in the process of being deprecated. RFC 3023 also recommends that XML-based languages be given media types beginning in "application/" and ending in "+xml"; for example "application/atom+xml" for Atom. This page discusses further XML and MIME.

The ubiquity of text file authoring software (basic text editors such as Notepad and TextEdit as well as word processors) facilitates rapid XML document authoring and maintenance. Prior to the advent of XML, there were very few data description languages that were general-purpose, Internet protocol-friendly, and very easy to learn and author. In fact, most data interchange formats were proprietary, special-purpose, "binary" formats (based foremost on bit sequences rather than characters) that could not be easily shared by different software applications or across different computing platforms, much less authored and maintained in common text editors.

By leaving the names, allowable hierarchy, and meanings of the elements and attributes open and definable by a customizable schema, XML provides a syntactic foundation for the creation of custom, XML-based markup languages. The general syntax of such languages is rigid — documents must adhere to the general rules of XML, assuring that all XML-aware software can at least read (parse) and understand the relative arrangement of information within them. The schema merely supplements the syntax rules with a set of constraints. Schemas typically restrict element and attribute names and their allowable containment hierarchies, such as only allowing an element named 'birthday' to contain 1 element named 'month' and 1 element named 'day', each of which has to contain only character data. The constraints in a schema may also include data type assignments that affect how information is processed; for example, the 'month' element's character data may be defined as being a month according to a particular schema language's conventions, perhaps meaning that it must not only be formatted a certain way, but also must not be processed as if it were some other type of data.

In this way, XML contrasts with HTML, which has an inflexible, single-purpose vocabulary of elements and attributes that, in general, cannot be repurposed. With XML, it is much easier to write software that accesses the document's information, since the data structures are expressed in a formal, relatively simple way.

XML makes no prohibitions on how it is used. Although XML is fundamentally text-based, software quickly emerged to abstract it into other, richer formats, largely through the use of datatype-oriented schemas and object-oriented programming paradigms (in which the document is manipulated as an object). Such software might treat XML as serialized text only when it needs to transmit data over a network, and some software doesn't even do that much. Such uses have led to "binary XML", the relaxed restrictions of XML 1.1, and other proposals that run counter to XML's original spirit and thus garner criticism.

Strengths of XML

* It is a simultaneously human and machine-readable format;
* It supports Unicode, allowing almost any information in any written human language to be communicated;
* It can represent the most general computer science data structures: records, lists and trees;
* Its self-documenting format describes structure and field names as well as specific values;
* The strict syntax and parsing requirements make the necessary parsing algorithms extremely simple, efficient, and consistent.

XML is also heavily used as a format for document storage and processing, both online and offline, and offers several benefits:

* Its robust, logically-verifiable format is based on international standards;
* The hierarchical structure is suitable for most (but not all) types of documents;
* It manifests as plain text files, unencumbered by licenses or restrictions;
* It is platform-independent, thus relatively immune to changes in technology;
* Its predecessor, SGML, has been in use since 1986, so there is extensive experience and software available.

Criticisms of XML

* Its syntax is verbose and redundant. This was intentional and contributes to ease of parsing and error detection, but also poses some problems. Intensively marked-up documents can become so cluttered as to be unreadable; however, there are different interpretations of "unreadable." To some, it means "unreadable in a plain text editor". In this respect, XML is favorable at least when compared to binary formats, which may not even render correctly in a text editor at all. Another interpretation of "unreadable" derives from comparing XML with other text-based formats, such as JSON or YAML; in which case the comparisons entail a certain degree of subjectivity.

* The redundancy may affect application efficiency through higher storage and transmission costs, even though compression is commonly very effective for XML data (precisely because its redundancy leads to low entropy). This is particularly problematic for multimedia applications running on cell phones and PDAs which attempt to use XML to describe images and video.

* Generic XML parsers must be able to recurse arbitrarily nested data structures and may perform additional checks to detect improperly formatted or differently ordered syntax or data (this is because the markup is descriptive and partially redundant, as noted above). This amounts to overhead for very basic uses of XML, which may be significant where resources are scarce - for example in embedded systems. Furthermore, additional security considerations arise when XML input is fed from untrustworthy sources and resource exhaustion or stack overflows are possible.

* Some consider the syntax to contain a number of obscure, unnecessary features born of its legacy of SGML compatibility. However, an effort to settle on a subset called "Minimal XML" led to the discovery that there was no consensus on which features were in fact obscure or unnecessary.

* The basic parsing requirements do not directly support data types; XML provides no specific notion of "integer", "string", "boolean", "date", and so on. For example, there is no provision for mandating that "3.14159" be a floating-point number rather than a seven-character string. Such conversions require processing. Again this is intentional: expressing the quantity ten as the string "10" completely avoids problems such as the integer storage formats of various computers, which also require conversions when data moves between machines. Consequently, this can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the application. Most XML schema languages add datatype functionality.

* The hierarchical model for representation is limited when compared to the relational model, since it only gives a fixed, monolithic view of the tree structure: for example, either actors under movies, or movies under actors. This is countered with the statement that the hierarchical model for representation is more powerful because it can directly represent recursive and iterative structures without resorting to serial number fields, recursive join operations, and sorting; which model holds the practical advantage depends on the data and operations required. This objection does not apply to the use of XML to serialize relational data, but pertains to the use of XML to express data relations directly, because XML naturally expresses the hierarchical syntax of the SQL query language which is used to serialize relational databases as one method of database backup.

* Expressing overlapping (non-hierarchical) node relationships requires extra effort. Such techniques are a current research topic among researchers interested in XML.

* Mapping XML to the relational or object oriented paradigms is often cumbersome, although the reverse is typically easy. Some take this as evidence that XML's model is indeed the more powerful.

* Some have argued that XML can be used for data storage only if the file is of low volume, but this is only true given particular assumptions about architecture, data, implementation, and other issues. Even very large SGML and XML structures can be accessed very rapidly.

International use

XML supports the direct use of almost any Unicode character in element names, attributes, comments, character data, and processing instructions. Therefore, the following is a well-formed XML document, even though it includes both Chinese and Cyrillic characters:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<俄语>Данные</俄语>

Versions of XML

There are two current versions of XML. The first, XML 1.0, was initially defined in 1998. It has undergone minor revisions since then, without being given a new version number, and is currently in its fourth edition, as published on August 16, 2006. It is widely implemented and still recommended for general use. The second, XML 1.1, was initially published on February 4, 2004, the same day as XML 1.0 Third Edition, and is currently in its second edition, as published on August 16, 2006. It contains features — some contentious — that are intended to make XML easier to use in certain cases[13] - mainly enabling the use of line-ending characters used on EBCDIC platforms, and the use of scripts and characters absent from Unicode 2.0. XML 1.1 is not very widely implemented and is recommended for use only by those who need its unique features.

XML 1.0 and XML 1.1 differ in the requirements of characters used for element and attribute names: XML 1.0 only allows characters which are defined in Unicode 2.0, which includes most world scripts, but excludes those which were added in later Unicode versions. Among the excluded scripts are Mongolian, Cambodian, Amharic, Burmese, and others.

Almost any Unicode character can be used in the character data and attribute values of an XML 1.1 document, even if the character is not defined, aside from having a code point, in the current version of Unicode. The approach in XML 1.1 is that only certain characters are forbidden, and everything else is allowed, whereas in XML 1.0, only certain characters are explicitly allowed, thus XML 1.0 cannot accommodate the addition of characters in future versions of Unicode.

In character data and attribute values, XML 1.1 allows the use of more control characters than XML 1.0, but, for "robustness", most of the control characters introduced in XML 1.1 must be expressed as numeric character references. Among the supported control characters in XML 1.1 are two line break codes that must be treated as whitespace. Whitespace characters are the only control codes that can be written directly.

There are also discussions on an XML 2.0, although it remains to be seen if such will ever come about. XML-SW (SW for skunk works), written by one of the original developers of XML, contains some proposals for what an XML 2.0 might look like: elimination of DTDs from syntax, integration of namespaces, XML Base and XML Information Set (infoset) into the base standard.

The World Wide Web Consortium also has an XML Binary Characterization Working Group doing preliminary research into use cases and properties for a binary encoding of the XML infoset. The working group is not chartered to produce any official standards. Since XML is by definition text-based, ITU-T and ISO are using the name Fast Infoset for their own binary infoset to avoid confusion (see ITU-T Rec. X.891 | ISO/IEC 24824-1).

Above article originally from wikipedia.org. Above article is available under GNU Free Documentation License.