5.8. Parsers with XML

XML is a project of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). XML is actually a metalanguage—a facility for creating new languages using markup.

5.8.1. A Brief History of XML

The idea of markup languages is to include datatype information along with data in a human-readable form. Markup originated in printed form, when editors literally marked up printed pages, indicating changes and printing information, such as whether a word should be in bold. Carrying over this idea to computers seems natural—just write something like <bold>this</bold> to tell the computer to write a word in bold.

Over time, developers found that they wanted to be able to set up templates so that two different documents would have the same look. A template ...

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