XML - Extensible Markup Language

Background

• Extremely commonly used.
• Graddaddy of them all. Totally abstract.
• Self-describing, cross platform format for hierarchical data
  • Especially in cross-platform/cross-architecture applications
  • Very good support for different character sets
• Basis for a lot of “open data”

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<student>
  <name>
    Pito Salas
  </name>
  <gender>
    male
  </gender>
</student>

Characteristics

• Precise nesting with and (case sensitive)
• Attributes embedded in tags go to google

More info

• Here’s an example of a really big xml file: Voting Data File
• An excellent viewer and editor for XML is Xmplify
• Read more about XML tags at XML TUtorial
• Discussion: When would you use XML? If you didn’t have XML what would you use?