What is XML?

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is a text-based markup language derived from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). XML tags identify the data and are used to store and organize the data, rather than specifying how to display it like HTML tags, which are used to display the data.

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. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.