Revision as of 00:27, 8 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

Most built-in plain text editors like Notepad in Windows or TextEdit in Mac are able to open and edit XML files, however this is not a good solution when you need to edit large amounts of information.

General purpose spreadsheet tools

• Microsoft Excel
• Libre Office http://www.libreoffice.org/download (free)
• Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/ (free)

General purpose text/code editors

Mac

• TextWrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/
• Kod http://kodapp.com/
• 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
• Serna XML Editor http://www.syntext.com/products/serna-free/

Google Docs

Google docs https://docs.google.com have a spreadsheet tool. However they do not offer native XML on their visual interface you can retrieve any spreadsheet you create in XML using its API http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/reference.html

• Tutorial http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/open-science-h1n1-processing-and-the-google-spreadsheet-api

Parsing

Processing

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