Extensible Markup: XML

Domain-specific languages

• HTML for publishing, not for music, math, etc.
• Data representation language, not document language
• Design goals:
  • Easy to create, read (human), parse (machine, compare to HTML), transport
  • Extensible.
  • One parser.
  • Mix and match "applications" without name collisions XML namespaces
  • Syntactic terseness of minimal importance

XML for future syntaxes (SMIL, MathML, RDF, ...)

See the XML 1.0 Recommendation and the XML Activity.