XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a popular and widely-implemented standard: you can use XML to create documents and data records that are fully portable and platform-independent. Both the major XMLNews formats, XMLNews-Story and XMLNews-Meta, are based on XML.

This tutorial provides a brief overview of XML to help you become familiar with the markup language's most common features. After reading the tutorial, you should be able to read examples that use XML syntax and understand the basic structure of an XML document. The tutorial concentrates on the technical rather than the business side of XML, and is aimed at technical specialists such as software engineers and documentation writers who are approaching XML for the first time.

Although XML 1.0 is not a complicated format, there are many more details (and much terminology) that this tutorial does not cover. If you are planning to implement software that reads or writes XML directly (rather than through a specialized library), then you will need to refer to the XML 1.0 Recommendation, which is available online and free of charge from the World Wide Web Consortium: the Recommendation is the single authoritative source for all XML work.