The Big List of XML Technologies

Below is a list of XML acronyms and technologies. I thought it might be useful to gather these things together in one place as a quick reference. I'll be filling in gaps gradually as time permits. Send any corrections, additions or suggestions to <editor@xmlsucks.org>.


ADS (Advertisement and Discovery of Services)
TODO
[white paper]
Atom
An XML format for publishing news feeds for syndication. Intended as the successor to RSS. Originally called by various other names, including Echo and Pie.
[Wiki, Specification (Pre-draft 0.3, 2003)]
AuthXML
An XML language for expressing information about authentication an authorisation.
[Second draft specification (PDF, 2000)]
BEEP (Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol)
A protocol built on TCP/IP which is designed for asynchronous peer-to-peer exchange of XML data. Intended as an alternative to HTTP in some situations. Also known as BXXP.
[Core, RFC 3080 (2001), Mapping to TCP, RFC 3081 (2001)]
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
Describes business processes in XML, as a layor on top of WSDL.
[Homepage]
BXXP (Blocks eXtensible eXchange Protocol)
A different name for BEEP, pronounced in the same way.
Canonical XML
TODO
[W3C recommendation (2001)]
CDF (Channel Definition Format)
XML language for providing syndicated headlines, or other updates to changing web content. An early form of RSS, from Microsoft. Rather than a simple sequence of items, it can supply a hierarchy of ‘channels’ containing items, with links to content as in RSS. Never took off.
[Specification (1997)]
CML (Chemical Markup Language)
An XML language for describing molecular structure.
[Homepage]
CMSML (Content Management System Markup Language)
An XML vocabulary for recording metadata about a content management framework, system or editor. Developed by OSCOM.
[Homepage]
cXML (Commerce XML)
An XML-based protocol for passing around purchase orders and other documents to do with commerce.
[cXML]
Common XML
A subset of XML 1.0, designed to make parsing and processing simpler.
[Specification]
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
A stylesheeting lanuage, written in a non-XML syntax, for expressing visual or auditory presentational styles which can be applied to HTML or XML documents.
[Level 1, W3C recommendation (1996), Level 2, W3C recommendation (1998)]
DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language)
An extension of XML and RDF. Something meant to help enable the ‘semantic web’.
[Homepage]
DCD (Document Content Description)
Obsolete schema language, deprecated in favour of XML Schema.
[W3C note (1998)]
DDML (Document Definition Markup Language)
Obsolete schema language, deprecated in favour of XML Schema.
[W3C note (1999)]
DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation)
A binary message format for wrapping up bits of data in a single message. Intended to be used with SOAP.
[IETF working draft (2002), Microsoft homepage]
DISCO
TODO
DOM (Document Object Model)
TODO
DSD (Document Structure Description)
A schema language for XML. It can be more expressive than the W3C XML Schema language (for example, allowing the ordering of elements within mixed content to be constrained), and is far simpler. Developed by AT&T and BRICS (a Danish university).
[Home page, Specification (1999)]
DSDL (Document Schema Definition Languages)
“…a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology.”
[Homepage]
DSML (Directory Services Markup Language)
An XML language for representing information in directories.
[Homepage]
DTD (Document Type Definition)
A schema language defined as part of the base XML specification. Uses a different syntax to the rest of XML, a hangover from SGML. DTDs are the only schema language which XML documents can reference with a mechanism built in to the original XML spec. They also provide the only way of defining the text expansions of entity references (meaning that you can't use entity references if you don't use DTDs).
[XML, W3C recommendation (2000)]
Dublin Core (DCMI)
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
[Homepage]
ebXML
Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language
[Homepage]
EXSLT
A set of extensions to XSLT, including XPath functions and elements. The website includes information about which XSLT processors support the various extensions.
[Homepage]
FinXML
A proprietary patent-pending XML technology to do with finance. The schemas are not publically available.
[Homepage]
FOAF (Friend of a Friend)
An application of RDF which specifies information about a person and their relationships to other people (friends, family and acquaintances).
[Homepage]
GML (Geography Markup Language)
An XML encoding for the transport and storage of geographic information, including both the spatial and non-spatial properties of geographic features. Developed by the OpenGIS Consortium.
[Specification]
HumanML (HumanMarkup)
For specifying human characteristics (physical, social, physcological, etc.) in XML.
[Homepage]
IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier)
URIs which can contain Unicode characters. Formerly known as IURIs.
[Homepage]
ITML (Information Technology Markup Language)
A set of specifications which define procedures for an Application Service Provider (ASP) to communicate with customers and other ASPs.
[Homepage]
IURI (Internationalized URI)
URIs which can contain Unicode characters. These are now called IRIs.
[Out-of-date IETF working draft (2000)]
Jabber
Originally an XML-based instant messaging protocol, now being pitched as a general-purpose XML fragment transport, sorta like BXXP/BEEP on acid (of course both projects seem completely unaware of each other), although IM still seems to be the only actual application.
[Homepage, Jabber Studio (developer's site)]
Lore1
A markup language based on XHTML, designed specifically for writing Python documentation.
[Tutorial]
Lore2
An XML query language developed at Stanford. Originally used a special data format, but later ported to use XML. The website says that the project is now a ‘success’ and so there's no longer any work being done on it. This to me indicates that it's obsolete. Some sample software is available, but it looks like the source isn't.
[Homepage]
MathML
A low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication.
[Homepage, Version 1.01, W3C recommendation (1999), Version 2, W3C recommendation (2001)]
MDDL (Market Data Definition Language)
XML format for information about financial markets, and the events which affect them.
[Homepage]
METS (Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard)
A schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, developed by the Library of Congress. The structural information might describe, for example, chapters in a book or songs on a CD.
[Homepage]
MNS (Modular Namespaces)
An earlier version of the idea that became NRL.
[Article (2003)]
MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)
A bibilographic XML schema developed by the Library of Congress, which encodes information about authors, titles, publishers, etc.
[Homepage]
NASSL (Network-Accessible Service Specification Language)
Obsolete vocabulary for descibing SOAP services, created by IBM. Deprecated in favour of WSDL.
NewsML
A packaging and metadata format for news content, apparently designed to work with ICE and NITF. Developed by a consortium of news providers.
[Homepage]
NITF (News Industry Text Format)
An XML vocabulary designed for news publishers to store their content in. It includes document markup based on HTML with a great deal of metadata.
[Homepage]
NRL (Namespace Routing Language)
An XML language for describing the schemas (in various formats) which apply to elements in a particular namespace, and for combining these so that the validitity of a composite XML document can be checked.
[Paper (2003)]
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)
A protocol built on HTTP for requesting and supplying metadata about ‘records’. The Open Archives Initiative is mainly interested in e-prints (electronically stored versions of documents, mainly academic papers) but the protocol is intended to have wider utility.
[Homepage, Specification]
OCS (Open Content Syndication)
A syndication vocabulary in the same spirit as RSS. Recent versions are based on RDF.
[Homepage]
OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)
XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information.
[Homepage]
OWL (OWL Web Ontology Language)
An XML vocabulary which builds on RDF and RDF-Schema, and is meant to provide richer information about the meaning of information, so that it can better be processed automatically. It is part of the so-called ‘semantic web’.
[Homepage]
o:XML
An object oriented programming language written using XML, and producing XML output in a similar way to XSLT. Has an expression language called o:Path, which is a superset of XPath.
[Homepage]
P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences)
Vocabulary for websites to describe their privacy policy. Also sometimes glossed as ‘Pretty Poor Privacy’.
[W3C recommendation (2002)]
PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata)
A packaging and metadata format, similar to NewsML, RSS, and XMLNews-Meta.
[Homepage]
Quilt
An XML query language, which was used as the basis of XQuery.
[Homepage]
RCML (R-Cubed Manipulation Language, or Real-time Remote Robotics Manipulation Language)
A XML vocabulary for describing interfaces through which robots can be controlled over a network. The first version of RCML was an extension to VRML, but version 2.0 was redefined as an application of XML.
[Homepage]
RDDL (Resource Directory Description Language)
A proposal for the resource which a namespace URI should identify. The resource is an XHTML document with special RDDL elements, which use XLink to link to stylesheets, schemas, etc. This means a user can plug a namespace URL into a browser to get some human readable documentation, and programs can automatically locate related resources identified by type.
[Article (2001), Specification]
RDF (Resource Description Framework)
TODO
[W3C recommendation (1999)]
RDF Vocabulary Description Language
TODO
[W3C working draft (2002)]
RDF Twig
A set of XPath extension functions for use with XSLT which provide better access to RDF data. Currently implemented in Java for Saxon and Xalan.
[Homepage, Paper (2003)]
RDQL (RDF Data Query Language)
TODO
RELAX (Regular Language description for XML)
A schema language for describing XML formats. To be superseded by RELAX-NG.
[Homepage]
RELAX-NG (Regular Language description for XML, Next Generation)
A schema language based on RELAX and TREX.
[Homepage]
RIML (Rule Identification Markup Language)
Part of XRML (Extensible Rule Markup Language).
RIXML (Research Information Exchange Markup Language)
XML vocabulary for financial research.
[Homepage]
RPV (Resource/Property/Value)
Alternative XML syntax for RDF. Invented by Tim Bray as a possible way to make RDF for accessible to the ‘view source effect’.
[Proposed specification, Article (2002)]
RSML (Rule Structure Markup Language)
Part of XRML (Extensible Rule Markup Language).
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary)
A vocabulary for describing resources which are suitable for syndication. Typically used to list articles on news websites or weblogs, allowing lists of recent articles to be ‘aggregated’ automatically. There are two different forms of RSS. The 0.9x and 2.x versions are very simple, and are known as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, or later ‘Rich Site Summary’. The 1.x versions are known as ‘RDF Site Summary’ and are based on RDF.
[Version 0.91 specification (Netscape, 1999), Version 0.91 alternative specification (UserLand, 2000), Version 1.0 homepage, Version 2.0 specification (UserLand, 2002), Tutorial, The myth of RSS compatibility (Mark Pilgrim, 2004)]
RTML (Rule Triggering Markup Language)
Part of XRML (Extensible Rule Markup Language).
RXML
An ‘XML compliant programming langauge’ supported by the Roxen WebServer.
[Homepage]
S2ML (Security Services Markup Language)
An XML-based protocol for authentication and authorisation. The website (www.s2ml.org) linked from the XML Cover Pages S2ML page seems to have vanished.
[Verisign's S2ML page]
SAAJ (SOAP with Attachments API for Java)
A Java API from Sun for creating and decoding SOAP messages which make use of ‘SOAP with Attachments’.
[Homepage]
SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
An standard for exchanging authentication and authorisation information.
[Homepage, Presentation]
SAX (Simple API for XML)
TODO
SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language)
Language for representing biological reactions.
[Homepage]
Schematron
TODO
[Homepage]
SCL (SOAP Contract Language)
Obsolete vocabulary for describing SOAP services, created by Microsoft. Deprecated in favour of WSDL.
SiXDML (Simple XML Data Manipulation Language)
SQL-like (non-XML syntax) language for manipulating XML in databases, and API to go with it. Uses XPath for ‘select’ queries.
[Working draft (2002)]
SlideML
An XML language for writing slides for presentations. The actual content of the slides is a subset of XHTML. Developed by OSCOM.
[Homepage]
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
Pronounced 'smile', ironically enough.
[Homepage, Version 1.0 W3C recommendation (1998), Version 2.0 W3C recommendation (2001)]
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
A complex XML-based RPC protocol. Or a “stateless, one-way message exchange paradigm”.
[W3C note (2000), W3C candidate recommendation (2002), Part 0, Primer, Part 1, Messaging Framework, Part 2, Adjuncts]
SOAP 1.2 Attachment Feature
Another way of supplying attachments with SOAP messages. See also ‘SOAP Messages with Attachments’.
[W3C working draft (2002)]
SOAP Version 1.2 Email Binding
An example of the ‘SOAP 1.2 Protocol Binding Framework’, showing how SOAP messages can be encapsulated within RFC 822 email messages.
[W3C note (2002)]
SOAP Messages with Attachments
A method of bundling attachments with a SOAP message.
[W3C note (2000)]
SOX (Schema for Object-Oriented XML)
Schema language, probably obsolete.
[W3C note (1999)]
Superx++
An object-oriented programming language written using XML syntax. Formerly called x++.
[Homepage]
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
TODO
SyncML
XML-based technology for synchronising data on mobile devices, such as PDAs.
[Homepage]
TREX (Tree Regular Expressions for XML)
A schema language for validating XML documents, now superseded by RELAX-NG.
[Homepage]
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
TODO
UnQL
A pattern-matching functional programming language with an ML-like syntax for retrieving information from XML data structures. Looks like a similar idea to YATL and XDuce.
[Paper (2000)]
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)
TODO
[RFC 2396 (1998)]
VXML (VoiceXML)
A markup language for creating voice interfaces to web services.
[Homepage]
WS-Attachments
A model to describe attachements to SOAP messages, and specifically to use DIME to encode them.
[IETF working draft (2002), Microsoft homepage]
WBXML (WAP Binary XML Content Format)
TODO
[W3C note (1999)]
WDDX (Web Distributed Data Exchange)
A format for serializing complex data structures, mainly database record sets, in XML.
[Homepage]
WebDoc
A document format, derived from XHTML 1.0 Strict, for storing documents of the sort that might be written in Microsoft Word. Some aspects of XHTML are simplified (entity references are not allowed, and elements for creating forms have been removed) and additional elements are defined for enforcing a hierarchical structure to document sections and for providing Dublin Core metadata. The format was invented by XML Workshop Ltd as an intermediate format for converting Word documents to web pages.
[Homepage]
WIDL (Web Interface Definition Language)
An XML vocabulary for describing web services. Probably obsolete.
[W3C note (1997)]
WML (Wireless Markup Language)
TODO
WRDL (Web Resource Description Language)
An XML language for describing REST-style web services, roughly equivalent to WSDL.
[Specification]
WSCI (Web Service Choreography Interface)
Describes the observable behavior of a web service. Can be used in conjunction with WSDL.
[Homepage]
WSCL (Web Services Conversation Language)
An XML language for describing the proper sequence of interactions with a web service, designed to work with WSDL.
[W3C note (2002)]
WS-Coordination (Web Services Coordination)
Framework for coordination between disparate web services.
[Homepage]
WSDD (Web Service Deployment Descriptor)
A high level web service description vocabulary, which Apache Axis uses to generate WSDL.
WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
An XML language for describing the interface defined by web services, designed to work with SOAP.
[Version 1.1 W3C note (2001), Version 1.2 W3C working draft (2002)]
WSFL (Web Services Flow Language)
An XML language for describing the intended ‘flow’ of interactions with a group of web services. Designed to work with WSDL.
[Specification (PDF, 2001), IBM article (2002)]
WSIL (Web Service Inspection Language)
An XML language for declaring the existence of web services. Defined by Microsoft and IBM. Consolidates ADS and DISCO.
[Microsoft specification (2001), Article]
WS-Referral
A protocol for configuring SOAP nodes to handle messages in different ways as they are routed through a series of nodes.
[Microsoft specification (2001), Microsoft homepage]
WS-Routing (Web Services Routing Protocol)
A protocol for routing SOAP-based web service messages via intermediate nodes.
[Microsoft specification (2001)]
WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets)
A web-services API for creating web-services which are pluggable into portals (this is guess-work; it's hard to work out what the specification is on about).
[Specification (2002)]
WS-Transaction (Web Services Transaction)
Defines a protocol, intended as a building block for use with SOAP and WSDL, that allows transaction-safe operations in web services. Builds on WS-Coordination.
[Specification]
WSXL (Web Service Experience Language)
TODO
[IBM note (2002)]
x++
The original name of what is now Superx++.
X3D
An XML equivalent of VRML, for modeling 3D virtual environments.
[Draft ISO standard]
XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language)
An XML language for describing access policies for internet resources.
[Homepage]
XBase
TODO
XBeans
TODO
XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)
An XML vocabulary for describing financial information.
[Homepage]
X-BULK (XML Key Management Specification Bulk Operation)
An extension of XKMS for bulk registering of public encryption keys.
[W3C working draft (2002)]
xCBL (XML Common Business Library)
XML languages for business (e-commerce, EDI, and the like).
[Homepage]
XDuce
A statically-typed functional programming language with an ML-like syntax, for manipulating XML data structures. A reference implementation in OCaml is available.
[Homepage]
XDR (XML Data Reduced)
Obsolete simplified version of XML Schema. Microsoft defined it and implemented it in MSXML 3, but newer versions of MSXML implement the full Schema specification.
XEditor
TODO
XEXPR
A Scripting Language for XML. A Lisp-like functional programming language which can be expressed in XML syntax.
[W3C note (2000)]
XFML (eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language)
An XML vocabulary for describing hierarchical faceted metadata. A ‘light weight’ equivalent of XTM.
[Homepage, Version 1, specification, comparison of XFML with XTM]
XForms
TODO
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Lanugage)
XInclude
A simple XML vocabulary for including the content of one XML file into another. It can use XPointer to reference particular parts of a document to include, or simply have the whole ‘infoset’ copied in.
[W3C candidate recommendation (2002)]
X-KISS (XML Key Information Service Specification)
A protocol for requesting information about a public encryption key. Part of the XKMS specification.
XKMS (XML Key Management Specification)
An XML-based protocol for distributing public encryption keys. Made up of X-KISS and X-KRSS.
[Version 2.0, W3C working draft (2002)]
X-KRSS (XML Key Registration Service Specification)
A definition of a web service for registering public encryption keys. Part of XKMS the specification.
XLANG
An XML-based notation for describing business processes made up of web services. Used in Microsoft's BizTalk server.
[Microsoft specification (2001)]
XLink (XML Linking Language)
A set of attributes which can be applied to elements in an XML document to describe links between it and other documents. Also allows linking of pairs of completely separate documents. Uses XPointer to link to parts of XML documents.
[W3C recommendation (2001)]
XMI (XML Metadata Interchange)
A language for exchanging meta-data between object modeling tools, such as programs for modeling object oriented design with UML.
[Homepage]
XML (Extensible Markup Language)
A syntax for storing tree structured data and writing marked-up documents. Complex in the extreme.
[Vesion 1.0, W3C recommendation (2000), Version 1.1, W3C proposed recommendation (2003)]
XML Information Set (Infoset)
An abstract description of the information which XML data contains, and definitions of terms for describing the structure of that data. It's meant to be a model of the structures you find in XML documents, but in practice programmers ignore it and use their own models.
[W3C recommendation]
XML-QL (XML Query Language)
A language for querying XML documents and returning new XML documents built from the data which matches. The syntax combines keywords with fragments of almost-XML: the </> abbreviation from SGML is supported, and tags, whose names are prefixed with ‘$’, can stand in for text and element names to be captured.
[W3C note (1998)[
XML Namespaces
An addition to the basic XML specification which adds special attributes for declaring namespaces, which are identified by URIs. A short prefix can be associated with a namespace, which can be used to mark particular elements and attributes as being part of it. It is now standard practice for XML vocabularies to specify a namespace URI for their elements, so that processors can pick out the data for a particular format and leave everything they don't understand unchanged.
[Version for XML 1.0, W3C recommendation (1999), Version for XML 1.1, W3C candidate recommendation (2002)]
XMLNews-Meta
An XML format for storing metadata about news stories, which might or might not be written in the companion XMLNews-Story format.
[Homepage]
XMLNews-Story
An XML vocabulary for writing news stories. It is a subset of NITF.
[Homepage]
XML Schema
A schema language, for describing the allowable structure of XML data, and providing default values for the content of elements.
[Part 0, Primer, W3C recommendation (2001), Part 1, Structures, W3C recommendation (2001), Part 2, Datatypes, W3C recommendation (2001)]
XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call)
An XML language for encoding the messages transferred in remote procedure calls, used to implement web services. A simpler alternative to SOAP.
[Homepage, Specification]
XML Signature
XML:DB
An API for accessing XML databases.
XML-Data
Obsolete schema language, deprecated in favour of XML Schema.
[W3C note (1998)]
XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform)
An XML framework for exchanging metadata, developed by Adobe and supported in many of their applications.
[Homepage]
XPath (XML Path Language)
A non-XML syntax for addressing parts of an XML document, used by XSLT and other specifications.
[Version 1, W3C recommendation (1999), Version 2, W3C working draft (2002)]
XPipe
XPointer (XML Pointer Language)
A syntax for identifying fragments within an XML document, intended to be used with URIs to point to bits of XML data. An extension of XPath. Used by XLink.
[W3C candidate recommendation (2001)]
XQL (XML Query Language)
A terse language for querying XML documents. Very similar to XPath, and probably a precursor to it. Probably obsolete because the homepage was last updated in 1999.
[Homepage]
XQuery
A query language which extends XPath 2 to provide much more powerful querying functionality. It is a strongly-typed functional programming language. The type system is based on that of W3C XML Schemas. Written using a terse syntax so that humans can type it, but can also be expressed in an XML syntax called XQueryX.
[W3C working draft (2003)]
XQueryX
An XML syntax for writing XQuery queries. The semantics are identical, but the queries are huge.
[W3C working draft (2003)]
XrML (eXtensible rights Markup Language)
Something to do with digital rights management (DRM).
XRML (Extensible Rule Markup Language)
A language for expressing knowledge ‘rules’. Consists of three parts: Rule Structure Markup Language (RSML), Rule Identification Markup Language (RIML) and Rule Triggering Markup Language (RTML).
[Specification (Word document, 2001)]
XRPM (eXtensible Resource Provisioning Management)
A standard for provisioning access rights.
[Homepage]
XSA (XML Software Autoupdate)
Vocabulary for software developers to describe their packages. Allows a directory of software to be automatically updated by fetching the XSA files it knows about.
[Homepage, XML.com article, DTD, listing of XML software which uses XSA]
XSL or XSL-FO (XML Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects)
TODO
[W3C recommendation (2001)]
XSLScript
An enhanced version of XSLT, which provides more powerful programming facilites with a more traditional syntax. XSLScript is converted into pure XSLT (cfront style) before being processed with a normal XSLT processor.
[Homepage]
XSLT (XML Stylesheet Language Transformations)
A technology for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or in to plain text or HTML. The XSLT language is actually a simple pure functional programming language written with XML and XPath syntax. The functionality it provides is very limited, so extensions to it have been defined, such as EXSLT.
[Version 1, W3C recommendation (1999), Version 2, W3C working draft (2002)]
XSP (XML Server Pages)
A way of inserting source code into XML, in much the same way as PHP and ASP. Used by Apache Cocoon and AxKit.
[AxKit documentation]
X-TASS (XML Trust Assertion Service Specification)
An XML language for expressing trust.
[Draft Specification]
XTM (XML Topic Maps)
An XML language for describing topic maps, which are descriptions of hierarchical faceted metadata. A similar, but simpler specification is XFML.
[Version 1, specification, comparison of XTM with XFML]
XUpdate
A vocabulary for describing updates to XML data. Changes can include insertion, deletion, renaming of elements in the target data, adding attributes and text, and so on. Written in an XML syntax itself. XPath can be used to select parts of the target data to apply alterations to.
[Working draft (2000)]
YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language)
A lightweight syntax for writting data structures. Can be used for many of the same things as XML, but can be more readable because it requires very little syntax to be wrapped round the actual data.
[Homepage, Specification (2002), Article (2002)]
YATL
An academic research project to define a declarative language for querying, converting and upadating XML data structures. Uses an ML-like syntax rather than XML for conciseness. See Xduce for something similar but more powerful. (You can tell it's an academic project because the implementation is in OCaml, and because the name is spelt in a way not reproducable by any typesetting system not derived from TeX.)
[Paper (2002)]
YAXML
An XML language for writting YAML data structures. Intended for those who want to use YAML “but require buzz-word compliance or the astethically-displeasing angle brackets of XML”.
[Homepage]

Thanks for contributions from: Aaron Crane, Nathan J. Mehl, Jeroen Ticheler, Keith C.