What is XML?
The technical definition of XML or Extensible Markup Language is “a document markup language for defining structured information”. But thats a little too technical, so let’s go deeper and see what that actually means.

A markup language helps your computer to know how to react and show you certain things! Let’s say you are using a word processor, you are typing your text and format it to fit your needs, but under those simple words there’s much more information than we see in the word processor, the information that tells our computer what font you want for that document, what size, color, if you have a paragraph after 57 words or not, if it’s bold or italic and so on.

As computers and developers became more and more sophisticated we needed to tell the computer more than how to show a text on our screen. It’s useful to define the type of content information.

When you define the content of your documents you are creating structured information. The structured information hes more to it than just the formating of the text on the screen. There are many types of structured information that we use every day. An address book hold information in a structured format. Each entry is defined.

One thing to note. XML, unlike HTML, isn’t really a language of tags. XML doesn’t have a set of tags or rules for use in that fashion. Rather, XML is the definition of how to create the tags in the first place.

XML Can Create Tags
Some say that XML is a meta language, or a language for building other languages. In a sense, this is true.

XML is a computer language for defining markup languages to create structured documents. You can use XML to create tags for defining your own documents or use tag languages created with XML for compatibility across the Internet.

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