This is the most common question I received after my seminar. The first and most important point about XML is that it's not a language itself. It's a structure that intend to describe data and to be more exact to describe volcabulary. It consists of tags which are enclosed by a pair of angle brackets. The choice of tag names and structures is flexible. Example "<name>" is a tag.
- XML is not a language, its rules are used to construct other languages. HTML is a web page mark up language based on XML.
- XML used tags to mark-up content
- XML is based on SGML.
Now what is SGML? Before XML there was a standard created for mark-up language called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). It is so comphrensive that it is very difficult to use so XML was created to address specific needs.
