XML

Short for eXtensible Markup Language, a new specification being developed by the W3C(World Wide Web Consortium). XML is designed especially for Web documents, basically it is a lite version of SGML. It gives designers the ability to create their own customized tags to provide functionality not available with HTML. For example, XML supports links that point to multiple documents, as opposed to HTML links, which can reference just one destination each. Whether XML eventually replaces HTML as the standard Web formatting specification depends a lot on whether it is supported by future Web browsers. Right now the only major browser vendor to endorse XML is Microsoft, which has stated that XML will be supported in a future version of Internet Explorer.