I think I've heard that one before. XML Marks the Spot . This month, I am going to revisit XML from a different perspective. It's really interesting to see what Internet Explorer 5.0 does with XML all by itself, but that's the stuff for a future column. XML Overview First, let's take a look at what XML is.
Many people think that XML is a file type or programming language.
XML is really a specification for serving, transporting, and saving data. This is from the Extensible Markup Language 1.0 recommendation dated February 10, 1998. The declaration lets any application that uses this file or data know that it is XML-specific and conforms to XML version 1.0. This paves the way for future applications to use data created for different XML versions. This tag is required for most commercial parsers to use an XML stream or file.