What is an XML file?
Extensible Markup Language
- Developed By
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Initial Release
- 1998
- MIME Type
- text/xml
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879) and defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Recommendation. It utilizes a self-descriptive tree structure of nested tags and attributes to store and transport data, independent of hardware or software platforms. Unlike HTML, XML does not use predefined tags; it relies on custom schemas (XSD) or DTDs to define the document structure.
How to open an XML file
Since XML is encoded in plain text (usually UTF-8), it can be opened and edited with any text editor such as Notepad++, Sublime Text, or Visual Studio Code. Web browsers like Chrome and Firefox natively render the file as a collapsible Document Object Model (DOM) tree for viewing structure.