XML is astandardformarkup-based
structured documents. Here is an example
XMLdocument: <?xml version="1.0"?>
<EXAMPLE prop1="gnome is great" prop2="& linux too">
<head>
<title>Welcome to Gnome</title>
</head>
<chapter>
<title>The Linux adventure</title>
<p>bla bla bla ...</p>
<image href="linus.gif"/>
<p>...</p>
</chapter>
</EXAMPLE> The first line specifies that it is an XML document and
givesusefulinformation about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is
atextformat whose structure is specified by tags between
brackets.Eachtag opened has to be closed. XML is pedantic
about this.However, ifa tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as
both theopening andclosing tag if it ends with />rather
thanwith>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no
content(justan attribute) and is closed by ending the tag
with/>. XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging
fromlongterm structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps
ofSGML) tosimple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file
formatting(glade),spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents
such asWebDAV whereit is used to encode remote calls between a client and
aserver. Daniel Veillard | 
