# 1. Introduction

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

This library includes a set of Ada95 packages to manipulate XML input. It implements the XML 1.0 standard (see the references at the end of this document), as well as support for namespaces and a number of other optional standards related to XML.

We have tried to follow as closely as possible the XML standard, so that you can easily analyze and reuse languages produced for other languages.

This document isn’t a tutorial on what XML is, nor on the various standards like DOM and SAX. Although we will try and give a few examples, we refer the reader to the standards themselves, which are all easily readable.