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XML Short for eXtensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

Whether XML eventually supplants HTML as the standard Web formatting specification depends a lot on whether it is supported by future Web browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5 handles XML, but renders it as CSS, and Mozilla (Netscape) is still in experimenting with XML support.