XML, a document formatting language used for some World Wide Web pages. XML began to be developed in the 1990s because HTML (hypertext markup language), the basic format for Web pages, does not allow the definition of new text elements; that is, it is not extensible. XML is a simplified form of SGML (standard generalized markup language) intended for documents that are published on the Web. Like SGML, XML uses DTDs (document type definitions) to define document types and the meanings of tags used in them. XML adopts conventions that make it easy to parse, such as that document entities are marked by both a beginning and an ending tag, such as <BEGIN>…</BEGIN>. XML provides more kinds of hypertext links than HTML, such as bidirectional links and links relative to a document subsection.
Because an author may define new tags, an XML DTD must also contain rules that instruct a Web browser how to interpret them—how an entity is to be displayed or how it is to generate an action such as preparing an e-mail message.