Page 20 - GAO-02-327 Electronic Government: Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language

Chapter 1: Background: Features and Current
Federal Use of XML

XML Supports XML is a nonproprietary set of standards for tagging information so that it
can be transmitted over a network such as the Internet and readily
Internet-Based Data interpreted by many different computer systems. It is platform-
Exchange independent, meaning that it can operate on any combination of computer
hardware and XML-enabled software. The core XML standard, known as
XML 1.0, was adopted in 1998 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),
which has jurisdiction over the Internet’s technical standards. It is a subset
of the well-established Standard Generalized Markup Language, which was
approved and published by the International Organization for
2
Standardization in the 1980s and is used primarily in large organizations
for tagging technical documents.

XML code is designed to be clearly intelligible to a human reader and
involves embedding descriptive tags around data in a computerized text
file. Figure 2 shows a simple example where “President George
Washington” has been tagged in XML to indicate what kind of data each of
the three words represents. The “NAME” tag uses a hierarchical
structuring capability to distinguish two subcategories of tags, “FIRST”
and “LAST.” All XML documents have the ability to structure data in a
similar hierarchical manner. The example also includes the use of a data
attribute—a rank of “1” has been assigned to the office of the president.

Figure 2: XML Code Example

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the current standard for displaying
information on the World Wide Web, also uses tags embedded in text files
and is also a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language.

2
Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986.

Page 16 GAO-02-327 Electronic Government