Concept

XML

Overview

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, such as those used in web services.

Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces (APIs) to aid the processing of XML data.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…

   Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith

   States what XML is.

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2. In regard to such names of attributes as are connotative, and express attributes of those attributes, there is no difficulty: like other connotative names they are defined by declaring their connotation. Thus, the word _fault_ may be defined, "a quality productive of evil or inconvenience." Sometimes, again, the attribute to be defined is not one attribute, but an union of several: we have only, therefore, to put…

   John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic

   States what XML is.

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3. Therefore the essential attributes, especially when expressed in the abstract, are not to be appropriated to the persons. Obj. 3: Further, property is prior to the appropriated, for property is included in the idea of the appropriated. But the essential attributes, in our way of understanding, are prior to the persons; as what is common is prior to what is proper. Therefore the essential attributes are not to be…

   Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I

   States what XML is.

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Related ideas

• Internet
• Isomorphism
• Semantics
• Memory
• Lingua franca
• Chinese characters
• World Wide Web Consortium
• XML Schema (W3C)

Opposing perspectives

• A

Place in the tradition

Part of Fuzzy logic.

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