Setting the Stage

There is no intrinsic difference in kind between an email message and a Pascal program, between a Chinese menu and a set of result rows from a database: they are all structured texts written for the benefit of and consumption by both humans and computers. --MH, circa 1987

XML all about structured text
makes repurposing, refactoring, reshuffling, reusing information mainstream
for data or prose (computers and humans), equally
NOT: a programming language
NOT: an extension of HTML
NOT: a specific set of tags