What is Extensible Markup Language (XML)? | Why XML is superior to HTML? | Brain Corner

shivamsah969
Oct 7, 2021
2 min read

'XML'

Xml, stands for Extensible Markup Language, is a framework for defining markup languages. In contrast to HTML, there is no fixed collection of markup tags in XML. Instead, XML lets us define our own tags, tailored for the kind of information that we wish to represent. XML's purpose is to aid information systems in sharing structured data, especially via the Internet, to encode documents, and to serialize data.

'Why XML is superior to HTML?'

XML allows authors and providers to design their own document markup instead of being limited to HTML. For the following reasons we can say XML is superior than HTML :

Information content can be richer and easier to use, because the descriptive and hypertext linking abilities of XML are much greater than those available in HTML.
XML can provide more and more better facilities for browser presentation and performance, using XSLT and CSS stylesheets;
It removes many of the underlying complexities of SGML-format HTML (which led to them being ignored and broken) in favour of a more flexible model, so writing programs to handle XML is much easier than doing the same for all the old broken HTML.
Information becomes more accessible and reusable, because the more flexible markup of XML can be used by any XML software instead of being restricted to specific manufacturers as has become the case with HTML.
XML files can be used outside the web as well, in existing document-handling environments (e.g. publishing).