Vadim Motorine's Ideas Blog

XML in Seven Words

XML is the three types of tags.

That's all. There is nothing more in XML.

Example: <a>, </a> or <b/> .

Most thick books about XML just describe which tag names the particular company suggests for the standard that this company hopes make money on. So, the most of XML books are the kind of the advertisement combined with specification for the tag names that the company suggests as the standard, say, for the documents exchange or other purposes.

It turned out however that , probably, the most popular standard that XML is used for is the news RSS Feed and as far as I know that standard was born without heavy advertisement and printing thick books.

There are naturally books that describe the programs that work with XML. But this is another story. Most of these programs in essence just check that for every tag we have the matched tag and can give us what is between.

I believe that is enough information for anybody to start using XML.

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