A Brief Introduction to XML

Like HTML, XML is a plain text data format with structural tagging. Unlike HTML, which has a predefined set of tags that represent the structuring and rendering facilities of modern web browsers, XML has no pre-defined document tags. Instead, XML allows applications to define their own sets of tags for use according to the XML syntactical rules. Using XML can be very simple or very complex, depending on how many of the fancy features you try to use. Ganymede uses fairly simple XML, and this page is intended to present the most basic facts about XML that you will need to know to write syntactically valid XML files that Ganymede can handle.

Facts about XML:

That's about all you should need to know about XML, at least as far as we'll need to talk about in discussing Ganymede. If you want to read about things like external reference entities, Document Type Definitions/DTD's, or the precise Backus-Naur style specification for what characters are allowed to go where when, you can probably find your way to the original XML standards documents over at www.XML.com.


Jonathan Abbey
Last modified: Fri Jul 27 21:39:40 CDT 2001