The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability across theInternet.[6] It is a textual data format with strong support viaUnicode for differenthuman languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is widely used for the representation of arbitrarydata structures,[7] such as those used inweb services.[8]
The main purpose of XML isserialization, i.e. storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. For two disparate systems to exchange information, they need to agree upon a file format. XML standardizes this process. It is therefore analogous to alingua franca for representing information.[9]
As amarkup language, XML labels, categorizes, and structurally organizes information.[10] XML tags represent the data structure and containmetadata. What is within the tags is data, encoded in the way the XML standard specifies.[10] An additionalXML schema (XSD) defines the necessary metadata for interpreting and validating XML. (This is also referred to as the canonical schema.)[11] An XML document that adheres to basic XML rules is "well-formed"; one that adheres to its schema is "valid".[11]
IETFRFC 7303 (which supersedes the olderRFC 3023), provides rules for the construction ofmedia types for use in XML message. It defines three media types:application/xml (text/xml is an alias),application/xml-external-parsed-entity (text/xml-external-parsed-entity is an alias) andapplication/xml-dtd. They are used for transmitting raw XML files without exposing their internalsemantics. RFC 7303 further recommends that XML-based languages be given media types ending in+xml, for example,image/svg+xml forSVG.
Further guidelines for the use of XML in a networked context appear inRFC 3470, also known as IETF BCP 70, a document covering many aspects of designing and deploying an XML-based language.[8]
The material in this section is based on the XMLSpecification. This is not an exhaustive list of all the constructs that appear in XML; it provides an introduction to the key constructs most often encountered in day-to-day use.
Character
An XML document is a string ofcharacters.Every legalUnicode character (except Null) may appear in an (1.1) XML document (while some are discouraged).
Processor and application
Theprocessor analyzes the markup and passes structured information to anapplication. The specification places requirements on what an XML processor must do and not do, but the application is outside its scope. Theprocessor (as the specification calls it) is often referred to colloquially as anXMLparser.
Markup and content
The characters making up an XML document are divided intomarkup andcontent, which may be distinguished by the application of simplesyntactic rules. Generally, strings that constitute markup either begin with the character< and end with a>, or they begin with the character& and end with a;. Strings of characters that are not markup are content. However, in aCDATA section, the delimiters<![CDATA[ and]]> are classified as markup, while the text between them is classified as content. In addition, whitespace before and after the outermost element is classified as markup.
Tag
Atag is a markup construct that begins with< and ends with>. There are three types of tag:
start-tag, such as<section>;
end-tag, such as</section>;
empty-element tag, such as<line-break />.
Element
Anelement is a logical document component that either begins with a start-tag and ends with a matching end-tag or consists only of an empty-element tag. The characters between the start-tag and end-tag, if any, are the element'scontent, and may contain markup, including other elements, which are calledchild elements. An example is<greeting>Hello, world!</greeting>. Another is<line-break />.
Attribute
Anattribute is a markup construct consisting of aname–value pair that exists within a start-tag or empty-element tag. An example is<img src="madonna.jpg" alt="Madonna" />, where the names of the attributes are "src" and "alt", and their values are "madonna.jpg" and "Madonna" respectively. Another example is<step number="3">Connect A to B.</step>, where the name of the attribute is "number" and its value is "3". An XML attribute can only have a single value and each attribute can appear at most once on each element. In the common situation where a list of multiple values is desired, this must be done by encoding the list into a well-formed XML attribute[i] with some format beyond what XML defines itself. Usually this is either a comma or semi-colon delimited list or, if the individual values are known not to contain spaces,[ii] a space-delimited list can be used. An example with space as a delimiter is<div>Welcome!</div>, where the attribute "class" both has the value "inner greeting-box" and also indicates the twoCSS class names "inner" and "greeting-box".
XML declaration
XML documents may begin with anXML declaration that describes some information about themselves. An example is<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>.
XML documents consist entirely of characters from theUnicode repertoire. Except for a small number of specifically excludedcontrol characters, any character defined by Unicode may appear within the content of an XML document.
XML includes facilities for identifying theencoding of the Unicode characters that make up the document, and for expressing characters that, for one reason or another, cannot be used directly.
Unicode code points in the following ranges are valid in XML 1.0 documents:[14]
U+0009 (Horizontal Tab), U+000A (Line Feed), U+000D (Carriage Return): these are the onlyC0 controls accepted in XML 1.0;
U+0020–U+D7FF, U+E000–U+FFFD: this excludes some noncharacters in theBMP (all surrogates, U+FFFE and U+FFFF are forbidden);
U+10000–U+10FFFF: this includes all code points in supplementary planes, including noncharacters.
XML 1.1 extends the set of allowed characters to include all the above, plus the remaining characters in the range U+0001–U+001F.[15] At the same time, however, it restricts the use of C0 andC1 control characters other than U+0009 (Horizontal Tab), U+000A (Line Feed), U+000D (Carriage Return), and U+0085 (Next Line) by requiring them to be written in escaped form (for example U+0001 must be written as or its equivalent). In the case of C1 characters, this restriction is a backwards incompatibility; it was introduced to allow common encoding errors to be detected.
The code pointU+0000 (Null) is the only character that is not permitted in any XML 1.1 document.
The Unicode character set can be encoded intobytes for storage or transmission in a variety of different ways, called "encodings". Unicode itself defines encodings that cover the entire repertoire; well-known ones includeUTF-8 (which the XML standard recommends using, without aBOM) andUTF-16.[16] There are many other text encodings that predate Unicode, such asASCII and variousISO/IEC 8859; their character repertoires are in every case subsets of the Unicode character set.
XML allows the use of any of the Unicode-defined encodings and any other encodings whose characters also appear in Unicode. XML also provides a mechanism whereby an XML processor can reliably, without any prior knowledge, determine which encoding is being used.[17] Encodings other than UTF-8 and UTF-16 are not necessarily recognized by every XML parser (and in some cases not even UTF-16, even though the standard mandates it to also be recognized).
XML providesescape facilities for including characters that are problematic to include directly. For example:
The characters "<" and "&" are key syntax markers and may never appear in content outside aCDATA section. It is allowed, but not recommended, to use "<" in XML entity values.[18]
Some character encodings support only a subset of Unicode. For example, it is legal to encode an XML document in ASCII, but ASCII lacks code points for Unicode characters such as "é".
It might not be possible to type the character on the author's machine.
All permitted Unicode characters may be represented with anumeric character reference. Consider the Chinese character "中", whose numeric code in Unicode is hexadecimal 4E2D, or decimal 20,013. A user whose keyboard offers no method for entering this character could still insert it in an XML document encoded either as中 or中. Similarly, the string "I <3 Jörg" could be encoded for inclusion in an XML document asI <3 Jörg.
� is not permitted because thenull character is one of the control characters excluded from XML, even when using a numeric character reference.[19] An alternative encoding mechanism such asBase64 is needed to represent such characters.
Comments may appear anywhere in a document outside other markup. Comments cannot appear before the XML declaration. Comments begin with<!-- and end with-->. For compatibility withSGML, the string "--" (double-hyphen) is not allowed inside comments;[20] this means comments cannot be nested. The ampersand has no special significance within comments, so entity and character references are not recognized as such, and there is no way to represent characters outside the character set of the document encoding.
An example of a valid comment:<!--no need to escape <code> & such in comments-->
XML 1.0 (Fifth Edition) and XML 1.1 support the direct use of almost anyUnicode character in element names, attributes, comments, character data, and processing instructions (other than the ones that have special symbolic meaning in XML itself, such as the less-than sign, "<"). The following is a well-formed XML document includingChinese,Armenian andCyrillic characters:
The XML specification defines an XML document as awell-formed text, meaning that it satisfies a list of syntax rules provided in the specification. Some key points include:
The document contains only properly encoded legal Unicode characters.
None of the special syntax characters such as< and& appear except when performing their markup-delineation roles.
The start-tag, end-tag, and empty-element tag that delimit elements are correctly nested, withnone missing and none overlapping.
Tag names are case-sensitive; the start-tag and end-tag must match exactly.
Tag names cannot contain any of the characters!"#$%&'()*+,/;<=>?@[\]^`{|}~, nor a space character, and cannot begin with "-", ".", or a numeric digit.
A single root element contains all the other elements.
The definition of an XML document excludes texts that contain violations of well-formedness rules; they are simply not XML. An XML processor that encounters such a violation is required to report such errors and to cease normal processing.[21][22] This policy, occasionally referred to as "draconian error handling", stands in notable contrast to the behavior of programs that processHTML, which are designed to produce a reasonable result even in the presence of severe markup errors.[23] XML's policy in this area has been criticized as a violation ofPostel's law ("Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept").[24]
In addition to being well formed, an XML document may bevalid. This means that it contains a reference to aDocument Type Definition (DTD), and that its elements and attributes are declared in that DTD and follow the grammatical rules for them that the DTD specifies.
XML processors are classified asvalidating ornon-validating depending on whether or not they check XML documents for validity.[26] A processor that discovers a validity error must be able to report it, but may continue normal processing.
A DTD is an example of aschema orgrammar. Since the initial publication of XML 1.0, there has been substantial work in the area of schema languages for XML. Such schema languages typically constrain the set of elements that may be used in a document, which attributes may be applied to them, the order in which they may appear, and the allowable parent/child relationships.
DTDs define adocument type rather than the types used by a namespace, thus grouping all constraints for a document in a single collection.
DTDs have the following limitations:
They have no explicit support for newerfeatures of XML, most importantlynamespaces.
They lack expressiveness. XML DTDs are simpler than SGML DTDs and there are certain structures that cannot be expressed with regular grammars. DTDs only support rudimentary datatypes.
They lack readability. DTD designers typically make heavy use of parameter entities (which behave essentially as textualmacros), which make it easier to define complex grammars, but at the expense of clarity.
They use a syntax based onregular expression syntax, inherited from SGML, to describe the schema. Typical XML APIs such asSAX do not attempt to offer applications a structured representation of the syntax, so it is less accessible to programmers than an element-based syntax may be.
Two peculiar features that distinguish DTDs from other schema types are the syntactic support for embedding a DTD within XML documents and for definingentities, which are arbitrary fragments of text or markup that the XML processor inserts in the DTD itself and in the XML document wherever they are referenced, like character escapes.
DTD technology is still used in many applications because of its ubiquity.
A newer schema language, described by the W3C as the successor of DTDs, isXML Schema, often referred to by theinitialism for XML Schema instances, XSD (XML Schema Definition). XSDs are far more powerful than DTDs in describing XML languages. They use a richdatatyping system and allow for more detailed constraints on an XML document's logical structure. XSDs also use an XML-based format, which makes it possible to use ordinary XML tools to help process them.
RELAX NG (Regular Language for XML Next Generation) was initially specified byOASIS and is now a standard (Part 2:Regular-grammar-based validation ofISO/IEC 19757 – DSDL). RELAX NG schemas may be written in either an XML based syntax or a more compact non-XML syntax; the two syntaxes areisomorphic andJames Clark's conversion tool—Trang—can convert between them without loss of information. RELAX NG has a simpler definition and validation framework than XML Schema, making it easier to use and implement. It also has the ability to usedatatype frameworkplug-ins; a RELAX NG schema author, for example, can require values in an XML document to conform to definitions in XML Schema Datatypes.
Schematron is a language for makingassertions about the presence or absence of patterns in an XML document. It typically usesXPath expressions. Schematron is now a standard (Part 3:Rule-based validation ofISO/IEC 19757 – DSDL).
DSDL (Document Schema Definition Languages) is a multi-part ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 19757) that brings together a comprehensive set of small schema languages, each targeted at specific problems. DSDL includesRELAX NG full and compact syntax,Schematron assertion language, and languages for defining datatypes, character repertoire constraints, renaming and entity expansion, and namespace-basedrouting of document fragments to different validators. DSDL schema languages do not have the vendor support of XML Schemas yet, and are to some extent a grassroots reaction of industrial publishers to the lack of utility of XML Schemas forpublishing.
Some schema languages not only describe the structure of a particular XML format but also offer limited facilities to influence processing of individual XML files that conform to this format. DTDs and XSDs both have this ability; they can for instance provide theinfoset augmentation facility and attribute defaults. RELAX NG and Schematron intentionally do not provide these.
A cluster of specifications closely related to XML have been developed, starting soon after the initial publication of XML 1.0. It is frequently the case that the term "XML" is used to refer to XML together with one or more of these other technologies that have come to be seen as part of the XML core.
XML namespaces enable the same document to contain XML elements and attributes taken from different vocabularies, without anynaming collisions occurring. Although XML Namespaces are not part of the XML specification itself, virtually all XML software also supports XML Namespaces.
XML Base defines thexml:base attribute, which may be used to set the base for resolution of relative URI references within the scope of a single XML element.
XML Information Set or XML Infoset is an abstract data model for XML documents in terms ofinformation items. The infoset is commonly used in the specifications of XML languages, for convenience in describing constraints on the XML constructs those languages allow.
XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) is a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents, split into three parts:
XSLT (XSL Transformations), an XML language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents or other formats such as HTML, plain text, or XSL-FO. XSLT is very tightly coupled with XPath, which it uses to address components of the input XML document, mainly elements and attributes.
XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects), an XML language for rendering XML documents, often used to generate PDFs.
XPath (XML Path Language), a non-XML language for addressing the components (elements, attributes, and so on) of an XML document. XPath is widely used in other core-XML specifications and in programming libraries for accessing XML-encoded data.
XQuery (XML Query) is an XML query language strongly rooted in XPath and XML Schema. It provides methods to access, manipulate and return XML, and is mainly conceived as a query language forXML databases.
XML model (Part 11:Schema Association ofISO/IEC 19757 – DSDL) defines a means of associating any xml document with any of the schema types mentionedabove.
Some other specifications conceived as part of the "XML Core" have failed to find wide adoption, includingXInclude,XLink, andXPointer.
The design goals of XML include, "It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents."[6] Despite this, the XML specification contains almost no information about how programmers might go about doing such processing. TheXML Infoset specification provides a vocabulary to refer to the constructs within an XML document, but does not provide any guidance on how to access this information. A variety ofAPIs for accessing XML have been developed and used, and some have been standardized.
Existing APIs for XML processing tend to fall into these categories:
Stream-oriented APIs accessible from a programming language, for exampleSAX andStAX.
Tree-traversal APIs accessible from a programming language, for exampleDOM.
XML data binding, which provides an automated translation between an XML document and programming-language objects.
Declarative transformation languages such asXSLT andXQuery.
Syntax extensions to general-purpose programming languages, for exampleLINQ andScala.
Stream-oriented facilities require less memory and, for certain tasks based on a linear traversal of an XML document, are faster and simpler than other alternatives. Tree-traversal and data-binding APIs typically require the use of much more memory, but are often found more convenient for use by programmers; some include declarative retrieval of document components via the use of XPath expressions.
XSLT is designed for declarative description of XML document transformations, and has been widely implemented both in server-side packages and Web browsers. XQuery overlaps XSLT in its functionality, but is designed more for searching of largeXML databases.
Simple API for XML (SAX) is alexical,event-driven API in which a document is read serially and its contents are reported ascallbacks to variousmethods on ahandler object of the user's design. SAX is fast and efficient to implement, but difficult to use for extracting information at random from the XML, since it tends to burden the application author with keeping track of what part of the document is being processed. It is better suited to situations in which certain types of information are always handled the same way, no matter where they occur in the document.
Pull parsing treats the document as a series of items read in sequence using theiterator design pattern. This allows for writing ofrecursive descent parsers in which the structure of the code performing the parsing mirrors the structure of the XML being parsed, and intermediate parsed results can be used and accessed as local variables within the functions performing the parsing, or passed down (as function parameters) into lower-level functions, or returned (as function return values) to higher-level functions.[27] Examples of pull parsers include Data::Edit::Xml inPerl,StAX in theJava programming language, XMLPullParser inSmalltalk, XMLReader inPHP, ElementTree.iterparse inPython, SmartXML inRed, System.Xml.XmlReader in the.NET Framework, and the DOM traversal API (NodeIterator and TreeWalker).
A pull parser creates an iterator that sequentially visits the various elements, attributes, and data in an XML document. Code that uses this iterator can test the current item (to tell, for example, whether it is a start-tag or end-tag, or text), and inspect its attributes (local name,namespace, values of XML attributes, value of text, etc.), and can also move the iterator to the next item. The code can thus extract information from the document as it traverses it. The recursive-descent approach tends to lend itself to keeping data as typed local variables in the code doing the parsing, while SAX, for instance, typically requires a parser to manually maintain intermediate data within a stack of elements that are parent elements of the element being parsed. Pull-parsing code can be more straightforward to understand and maintain than SAX parsing code.
TheDocument Object Model (DOM) is an interface that allows for navigation of the entire document as if it were a tree ofnodeobjects representing the document's contents. A DOM document can be created by a parser, or can be generated manually by users (with limitations). Data types in DOM nodes are abstract; implementations provide their own programming language-specificbindings. DOM implementations tend to bememory intensive, as they generally require the entire document to be loaded into memory and constructed as a tree of objects before access is allowed.
XML data binding is a technique for simplifying development of applications that need to work with XML documents. It involves mapping the XML document to a hierarchy of strongly typed objects, rather than using the generic objects created by a DOM parser. The resulting code is often easier to read and maintain, and it can help to identify problems at compile time rather than run-time. XML data binding is particularly well-suited for applications where the document structure is known and fixed at the time the application is written. By creating a strongly typed representation of the XML data, developers can take advantage of modern integrated development environments (IDEs) that provide features like auto-complete, code refactoring, and code highlighting. This can make it easier to write correct and efficient code, and reduce the risk of errors and bugs. Example data-binding systems include theJava Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), XML Serialization in.NET Framework,[28] and XML serialization ingSOAP.
XML has appeared as afirst-class data type in other languages. TheECMAScript for XML (E4X) extension to theECMAScript/JavaScript language explicitly defines two specific objects (XML and XMLList) for JavaScript, which support XML document nodes and XML node lists as distinct objects and use a dot-notation specifying parent-child relationships.[29] E4X is supported by theMozilla 2.5+ browsers (though now deprecated) and AdobeActionscript but has not been widely adopted. Similar notations are used in Microsoft'sLINQ implementation for Microsoft .NET 3.5 and above, and inScala (which uses the Java VM). The open-source xmlsh application, which provides a Linux-like shell with special features for XML manipulation, similarly treats XML as a data type, using the <[ ]> notation.[30] TheResource Description Framework defines a data typerdf:XMLLiteral to hold wrapped,canonical XML.[31] Facebook has produced extensions to thePHP andJavaScript languages that add XML to the core syntax in a similar fashion to E4X, namelyXHP andJSX respectively.
The versatility of SGML for dynamic information display was understood by early digital media publishers in the late 1980s prior to the rise of the Internet.[22][33] By the mid-1990s some practitioners of SGML had gained experience with the then-newWorld Wide Web, and believed that SGML offered solutions to some of the problems the Web was likely to face as it grew.Dan Connolly added SGML to the list of W3C's activities when he joined the staff in 1995; work began in mid-1996 whenSun Microsystems engineerJon Bosak developed a charter and recruited collaborators. Bosak was well-connected in the small community of people who had experience both in SGML and the Web.[34]
XML was compiled by aworking group of eleven members,[35] supported by a (roughly) 150-member Interest Group. Technical debate took place on the Interest Group mailing list and issues were resolved by consensus or, when that failed, majority vote of the Working Group. A record of design decisions and their rationales was compiled byMichael Sperberg-McQueen on December 4, 1997.[36]James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group, notably contributing the empty-element<empty /> syntax and the name "XML". Other names that had been put forward for consideration included "MAGMA" (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), "SLIM" (Structured Language for Internet Markup) and "MGML" (Minimal Generalized Markup Language).[37] The co-editors of the specification were originallyTim Bray andMichael Sperberg-McQueen. Halfway through the project, Bray accepted a consulting engagement withNetscape, provoking vociferous protests from Microsoft. Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft'sJean Paoli as a third co-editor.[38]
The XML Working Group communicated primarily through email and weekly teleconferences. The major design decisions were reached in a short burst of intense work between August and November 1996,[39] when the first Working Draft of an XML specification was published.[40] Further design work continued through 1997, and XML 1.0 became aW3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998.
XML is a profile of an ISO standard, SGML, and most of XML comes from SGML unchanged. From SGML comes the separation of logical and physical structures (elements and entities), the availability of grammar-based validation (DTDs), the separation of data and metadata (elements and attributes), mixed content, the separation of processing from representation (processing instructions), and the default angle-bracket syntax. The SGML declaration was removed; thus, XML has a fixed delimiter set and adoptsUnicode as the documentcharacter set.
Other sources of technology for XML were theTEI (Text Encoding Initiative), which defined a profile of SGML for use as a "transfer syntax" andHTML. The ERCS (Extended Reference Concrete Syntax) project of the SPREAD (Standardization Project Regarding East Asian Documents) project of the ISO-related China/Japan/Korea Document Processing expert group was the basis of XML 1.0's naming rules; SPREAD also introduced hexadecimal numeric character references and the concept of references to make available all Unicode characters. To support ERCS, XML and HTML better, the SGML standard IS 8879 was revised in 1996 and 1998 with WebSGML Adaptations.
Ideas that developed during discussion that are novel in XML included the algorithm for encoding detection and the encoding header, the processing instruction target, the xml:space attribute, and the new close delimiter for empty-element tags. The notion of well-formedness as opposed to validity (which enables parsing without a schema) was first formalized in XML, although it had been implemented successfully in the Electronic Book Technology "Dynatext" software;[41] the software from the University of Waterloo New Oxford English Dictionary Project; the RISP LISP SGML text processor at Uniscope, Tokyo; the US Army Missile Command IADS hypertext system; Mentor Graphics Context; Interleaf and Xerox Publishing System.
The first (XML 1.0) was initially defined in 1998. It has undergone minor revisions since then, without being given a new version number, and is currently in its fifth edition, as published on November 26, 2008. It is widely implemented and still recommended for general use.
The second (XML 1.1) was initially published on February 4, 2004, the same day as XML 1.0 Third Edition,[42] and is currently in its second edition, as published on August 16, 2006. It contains features (some contentious) that are intended to make XML easier to use in certain cases.[43] The main changes are to enable the use of line-ending characters used onEBCDIC platforms, and the use of scripts and characters absent from Unicode 3.2. XML 1.1 is not very widely implemented and is recommended for use only by those who need its particular features.[44]
Prior to its fifth edition release, XML 1.0 differed from XML 1.1 in having stricter requirements for characters available for use in element and attribute names and unique identifiers: in the first four editions of XML 1.0 the characters were exclusively enumerated using a specific version of theUnicode standard (Unicode 2.0 to Unicode 3.2.) The fifth edition substitutes the mechanism of XML 1.1, which is more future-proof but reducesredundancy. The approach taken in the fifth edition of XML 1.0 and in all editions of XML 1.1 is that only certain characters are forbidden in names, and everything else is allowed to accommodate suitable name characters in future Unicode versions. In the fifth edition, XML names may contain characters in theBalinese,Cham, orPhoenician scripts among many others added to Unicode since Unicode 3.2.[43]
Almost any Unicode code point can be used in the character data and attribute values of an XML 1.0/1.1 document, even if the character corresponding to the code point is not defined in the current version of Unicode. In character data and attribute values, XML 1.1 allows the use of morecontrol characters than XML 1.0, but, for "robustness", most of the control characters introduced in XML 1.1 must be expressed as numeric character references (and #x7F through #x9F, which had been allowed in XML 1.0, are in XML 1.1 even required to be expressed as numeric character references[43]). Among the supported control characters in XML 1.1 are two line break codes that must be treated as whitespace characters, which are the only control codes that can be written directly.
There has been discussion of an XML 2.0, although no organization has announced plans for work on such a project. XML-SW (SW forskunkworks), which one of the original developers of XML has written,[45] contains some proposals for what an XML 2.0 might look like, including elimination of DTDs from syntax, as well as integration ofXML namespaces,XML Base andXML Information Set into the base standard.
In 2012,James Clark (technical lead of the XML Working Group) andJohn Cowan (editor of the XML 1.1 specification) formed the MicroXML Community Group within the W3C and published MicroXML, a specification for a significantly reduced subset of XML.[46] MicroXML provides a much simpler core syntax by stripping away many features of full XML, such as document type declarations and CDATA sections,[21] while ensuring XML namespace validity by disallowing names conflicting with namespace prefixing.
Due to the verbosity of textual XML, various binary formats have been proposed as compact representations for XML:Fast Infoset, based onASN.1, was published as an international standard by theITU-T in 2005, and later byISO.Efficient XML Interchange (EXI), a binary XML format originally developed by AgileDelta, was adopted as a W3C recommendation in 2011, with a second edition published in 2014.
XML and its extensions have regularly been criticized for verbosity, complexity and redundancy.[47]
Mapping the basic tree model of XML totype systems of programming languages or databases can be difficult, especially when XML is used for exchanging highly structured data between applications, which was not its primary design goal. However,XML data binding systems allow applications to access XML data directly from objects representing adata structure of the data in the programming language used, which ensurestype safety, rather than using theDOM orSAX to retrieve data from a direct representation of the XML itself. This is accomplished by automatically creating a mapping between elements of the XML schemaXSD of the document and members of a class to be represented in memory.
Other criticisms attempt to refute the claim that XML is aself-describing language[48] (though the XML specification itself makes no such claim).
JSON,YAML, andS-Expressions are frequently proposed as simpler alternatives (seeComparison of data-serialization formats)[49] that focus on representing highly structured data rather than documents, which may contain both highly structured and relatively unstructured content. However, W3C-standardized XML schema specifications offer a broader range of structuredXSD data types compared to simpler serialization formats and offer modularity and reuse throughXML namespaces.
^abStührenberg, Maik (February 2013).Quo vadis XML? History and possible future directions of the Extensible Markup Language.XML Prague 2013(PDF). Prague. pp. 141–162.ISBN978-80-260-3872-6.
^Kimber, W. Eliot (November 26, 2006)."XML: Ten Year Aniversary".Dr. Macro's XML Rants. Retrieved16 November 2017.
^The working group was originally called the "Editorial Review Board". The original members and seven who were added before the first edition was complete, are listed at the end of the first edition of the XML Recommendation (Bray, Paoli & Sperberg-McQueen 1998).
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