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> XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a general-purpose > specification for creating custom markup languages > > XML is most definitely *not* a specification. It is a document format? > defined by a specification, but the specification is not XML. > > However I'm not sure what to say it *is*. A language? A > grammar? A document format? Perhaps we should just follow the > XML spec spec: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a > subset of SGML that is completely described in this > document." That dodges the question "What kind of thing is XML" by saying "It's the same kind of thing as SGML". That's not a very good answer to the question. I think the answer "XML is a specification" is not a bad one. More accurately, it's a set of rules contained in a specification, but I think that's over-pedantic for the first sentence of an article for the general reader. Though personally, the expansion of the initialism XML claims that XML is a language, and I've always been quite happy with that. It might be a meta-language, but a meta-language is itself a language. Regards, Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/ http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
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