XML

XML is a general-purpose markup language defined by the W3C in 1998 as a simplified subset of SGML. It structures data as a tree of nested elements with attributes, readable by both humans and machines. XML underpins many modern file formats — DOCX, XLSX, ODT, and SVG are all XML-based ZIP archives — and remains widely used for configuration files, data exchange between systems, and document publishing pipelines.

File extensions	.xml
MIME type	application/xml
Developer	W3C
First released	1998
Category	Documents
Open standard	Yes

What opens XML files

• Any text editor
• Visual Studio Code
• All modern web browsers
• XMLSpy

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives