Revision as of 11:15, 7 December 2011

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards.

The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability over the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, for example in web services.

Many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been developed that software developers use to process XML data, and several XML schema exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages.

Edit and create

General purpos text/code editors

Mac

• TextWrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/
• Kod http://kodapp.com/
• Xmplify http://xmplifyapp.com/ (commercial)
• Apple Xcode. (For Mac OS X 10.6 and older register and download it from http://developer.apple.com/. For mac 10.7 go to the App Store. You can also install it from your Mac setup DVD's)

Win

• NotePad http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
• Microsoft Visual Studio http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express

XML editors

• Microsoft XML Notepad http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7973

Parsing

Processing

• http://processing.org/reference/XMLElement.html