XML isn't a format, exactly. It's a language for writing formats in.
So Open Office XML is different from Word XML, which is different from Mellel XML etc. And you can have XML formats for other kinds of documents, too, not just word processing ones.
The only restriction is that the data stored in an XML format must be storable as hierarchical data -- in a tree structure, effectively. It's up to the creator of the particular XML format to define the semantics of the format (what each label means) within that syntactic restriction. So XML formats can be very varied.
But if a format is made in XML and the details are published, then that makes it a comparatively simple task to write a convertor from that format to another XML format (or to HTML or to something else).
XML
Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler
