OII guide to XML and related standards
The European Commission's Open Information Interchange (OII) service, the objective of which is to provide all market actors with an overview of existing and emerging standards and industry specifications designed to facilitate the exchange of information in electronic form, has recently published a guide to Extensible Markup Language (XML) and related standards. XML is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation for marking up screen presentable data that cannot be marked up using the simple set of document presentation elements defined in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). It is also now widely accepted as a generalised method for interchanging information between computer programs over the Internet, and is seen as the best solution for the interchange of metadata about stored objects and programs and for the interchange of commercial data. The guide contains the following sections: - The XML family; - The role of XML; - SGML on the Web versus extensible HTML; - XML as a general purpose Web API; - Typical uses of XML; - XLinks - linking XML documents to other documents; - The difference between XML and HTML links; - Xpointers - identifying XML links; - XSL - The extensible stylesheet language; - XML schema definitions; - Linking XML documents to other applications; - Information sources for XML.