What does XML mean in Software?

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. 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 have been developed to aid software developers with processing XML data, and several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages. As of 2009, hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTML. XML-based formats have become the default for many office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, and Apple's iWork. XML has also been employed as the base language for communication protocols, such as XMPP.

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