Inria
Inria.fr
Inria Channel
Computer science from A to Z
X is for XML
Have you ever experienced the nightmare of incompatible files?
Moving from one software to another, or sometimes just installing a new version, can render some data irrecoverable.
Fortunately, we have XML, the universal format.
In an XML file, each element - paragraph, title, mathematical formula, graphic, sound - is "tagged" according to its nature. An application can easily recognise, among these elements, those which it is capable of processing, and use them accordingly. A title is displayed in bold, or extracted to form a table of contents. A musical note is played or drawn on a stave. The structure of the file is made perfectly clear, independently of the avatars that we want to submit to its content.
The XML standard does not establish a predefined list of tags, but standardises the way in which such tags are created according to the needs for each type of data: web pages (XHTML), graphics (SVG), musical scores (MusicXML). Hence the X, which stands for eXtensible.
Find out more
