BCP 70

RFC 3470

"Guidelines for the Use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) within IETF Protocols", January 2003

Canonical URL:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3470.txt
This document is also available in this non-normative format: TXT.PDF.

Status:

BEST CURRENT PRACTICE

Authors:

S. Hollenbeck
M. Rose
L. Masinter

Stream:

IETF

Source:

NON WORKING GROUP

Please refer here for any errata for this document. To submit a new errata report, go to the main errata page.

Abstract

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a framework for structuring data. While it evolved from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) -- a markup language primarily focused on structuring documents -- XML has evolved to be a widely-used mechanism for representing structured data. There are a wide variety of Internet protocols being developed; many have need for a representation for structured data relevant to their application. There has been much interest in the use of XML as a representation method. This document describes basic XML concepts, analyzes various alternatives in the use of XML, and provides guidelines for the use of XML within IETF standards-track protocols. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.

For the definition of Stream, see RFC 4844.