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XML is a standard for
markup-based structured documents. Here is an example XML
document:
<?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 gives useful
information about its encoding. Then the rest of the document is a text
format whose structure is specified by tags between brackets. Each
tag opened has to be closed. XML is pedantic about this. However, if
a tag is empty (no content), a single tag can serve as both the opening and
closing tag if it ends with /> rather than with
>. Note that, for example, the image tag has no content (just
an attribute) and is closed by ending the tag with />.
XML can be applied successfully to a wide range of tasks, ranging from
long term structured document maintenance (where it follows the steps of
SGML) to simple data encoding mechanisms like configuration file formatting
(glade), spreadsheets (gnumeric), or even shorter lived documents such as
WebDAV where it is used to encode remote calls between a client and a
server.
Daniel Veillard
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