3.3. XML
XML is a project originating at
W3C
to develop a future-proof successor to HTML. It is a
subset of SGML (see
appendix A of the
XML spec, or a longer discussion in a
W3C note from James Clark)
which removes some
of the features and options, and hence some of the
overwhelming flexibility of SGML. Crucially, however, XML
retains SGML's extensibility, and does not have
HTML's crippling restriction to a single set of markup
elements to describe an infinite variety of documents.
See also the
annotated spec
- The W3C's
XML pages are the best starting point.
The current version of the XML specification is a W3C
working draft.
- XLink (XML Linking Language/XLL)
is a draft specification for links in XML. It's clearly closely
related to the hyperlinks module of HyTime, without that relation
being made explicit in an architecture.
- XPointer (XML Pointer Language/XPTR?)
is a draft specification for location specifiers in XML, so that you
can refer, for example, to `the second section beneath the element
with id so-and-so'. As with XLink, it's closely related to HyTime.
- The
XML pages at the
SIL SGML repository.
- ...and the
XML FAQ
- SAX is the Simple API for XML, a `common,
event-based API for parsing XML documents'. See also the
SIL SAX links
- Free Java XML parser:
Ælfred, from
Microstar
- <
http://www.xml.com
>
- News story (17 Mar 1998),
Perl Opens Arms to XML,
talking about enhancements to Perl to make it deal with XML more
naturally.
- Yahoo's
XML pages.