Introduction to Etexts: About XML May 11th and 14th, 2002David
Seaman Director, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia
Library for fun and profit</claim> <div1 type="section" n="1">
<head> The Basic Scoop </head> XML is a simple set of tagging
instructions that allows one to make a set of tags in a web-
friendly manner -- tags that can describe the structure of a
document (like TEI does) rather than simply its appearance on-
screen (like HTML does). Q: Isn't that what SGML is supposed to
do? Yes -- XML is a simplified version of the SGML meta-
language. Some items have been removed from the SGML rules and
some syntax changed to create something that is almost as
powerful in its descriptive abilities, but much more web-
friendly, and much easier for software such as web browsers to
deal with. Q: So XML is "HTML on steroids!" No! HTML is a tag
set built from the tag-set building language SGML. XML is not a
tagset at all -- rather, it is a more easily used form of a tag-
set building language, derived from SG