XML
Extensible Markup Language
Judgement: Adopt
Load-bearing in finance, healthcare, and government; mature tooling around XSD, XSLT, XPath, XQuery.
Tag-based markup format for structured documents and data. Verbose by modern standards, but unmatched tooling around schemas, transformations, and validation (XSD, XSLT, XPath, XQuery).
Still the format of record in many enterprise integration scenarios — banking, healthcare, government, and SOAP-based B2B exchange.
Example
Elements carry structure, attributes carry metadata about the element they sit on.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<order id="1001">
<city>Bamberg</city>
<amount currency="EUR">49.90</amount>
<items>
<item sku="A-1" quantity="2"/>
</items>
</order>At a glance
- Category
- File Formats
- Governance
- W3C
- Status
- Stable since 1998; XML 1.0 (Fifth Edition, 2008) is the de-facto current spec
- First released
- 1998
Links
Related standards
Other standards in File Formats.
- AVRO — Apache Avro
- CSV — Comma-Separated Values (RFC 4180)
- JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
- PARQUET — Apache Parquet
- YAML — YAML Ain't Markup Language
- ORC — Apache ORC (Optimized Row Columnar)
- Lance
See XML in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare XML against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.