What is the difference between SGML and XML?

xml metadata markup sgml
Tom Lehman picture Tom Lehman · Apr 14, 2009 · Viewed 11.9k times · Source

All the Google results suck.

Answer

Matthew Lock picture Matthew Lock · May 4, 2012

SGML is much harder to parse than XML as it has things like implicitly closing tags that close automatically (without specifying a closing tag).

I suspect that SGML has such features as it was more common when SGML was introduced in the 80s for humans to directly create SGML by hand than is the case for XML today, and so these features saved lots of typing. For example the OED was marked up (by hand?) in SGML in the 80s.

enter image description here

Related questions

How do I comment out a block of tags in XML?

How do I comment out a block of tags in XML? I.e. How can I comment out <staticText> and everything inside it, in the code below? <detail> <band height="20"> <staticText> <…

Read More
Text editor to open big (giant, huge, large) text files

I mean 100+ MB big; such text files can push the envelope of editors. I need to look through a large XML file, but cannot if the editor is buggy. Any suggestions?

Read More
How do I parse XML in Python?

I have many rows in a database that contains XML and I'm trying to write a Python script to count instances of a particular node attribute. My tree looks like: <foo> <bar> <type foobar="1"/> &…

Read More