Extensible Markup Language (XML) Version 1.0

Status of this document This document is currently undergoing review by the members of the World Wide Web Consortium. It is a stable document derived from a series of working drafts produced over the last year as deliverables of the XML activity. It specifies a language created by subsetting an existing, widely used international text processing standard (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986 as amended and corrected) for use on the World Wide Web. Details of the decisions regarding which features of ISO 8879 to retain in the subset are available separately. XML is already supported by some commercial products, and there are a growing number of free implementations. Public discussions of XML are accessible online. This specification uses the term URI, which is defined by [Berners-Lee], a work in progress expected to update [RFC1738] and [RFC1808]. Should the work not be accepted as an RFC, the references to uniform resource identifiers (URIs) in this specification will become references to uniform resource locators (URLs). The review period for this Proposed Recommendation will end on January 5, 1998. Within 14 days from that time, the document's disposition will be announced: it may become a W3C Recommendation (possibly with minor changes), or it may revert to Working Draft status, or it may be dropped as a W3C work item. This document does not at this time imply any endorsement by the Consortium's staff or member organizations. Abstract The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple dialect of SGML which is completely described in this document. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.