> XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a general-purpose
> specification for creating custom markup languages
>
> XML is most definitely *not* a specification. It is a document format?
> defined by a specification, but the specification is not XML.
>
> However I'm not sure what to say it *is*. A language? A
> grammar? A document format? Perhaps we should just follow the
> XML spec spec: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a
> subset of SGML that is completely described in this
> document."
That dodges the question "What kind of thing is XML" by saying "It's the
same kind of thing as SGML". That's not a very good answer to the question.
I think the answer "XML is a specification" is not a bad one. More
accurately, it's a set of rules contained in a specification, but I think
that's over-pedantic for the first sentence of an article for the general
reader.
Though personally, the expansion of the initialism XML claims that XML is a
language, and I've always been quite happy with that. It might be a
meta-language, but a meta-language is itself a language.
Regards,
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
