What is the difference between SGML and XML?

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All the Google results suck.

Best question description ever. – HelloGoodbye Jun 25 '18 at 07:06 — HelloGoodbye, Jun 25 '18 at 07:06

Matthew Lock · Answer 1 · 2015-12-03T22:36:57.590

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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.

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edited Dec 03 '15 at 22:36

answered May 04 '12 at 01:00

Matthew Lock

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Quite true (see page 311 of the SGML handbook ;) – Javier Feb 18 '13 at 13:47

TStamper · Answer 2 · 2009-04-14T01:01:39.233

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XML is a subset of SGML,which means it takes the pros that SGML has to offer. XML was designed to make parsing much easier. XML, rather than SGML, also is widely used for deriving document specifications.

more dicscussed here:

What is the difference between SGML and XML?

edited Apr 14 '09 at 01:01

answered Apr 14 '09 at 00:55

TStamper

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score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 16 '13 at 05:23

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The main difference is that SGML specifies the standard for how to specify a document markup language or tags whereas XML specifies the standard for user defined tags(i.e a user can define his own tag)

For clarity in my answer refer the below link:

http://sdn.vlsm.org/share/LDP/authors/html/xmldifferences.html

Thank you.

answered Dec 16 '13 at 05:23

Bhanu Prakash

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Link is 404. Current explanation ignores that XML is a subset of SGML (see http://stackoverflow.com/a/745954/873282) – koppor Dec 03 '15 at 15:12

What is the difference between SGML and XML?

3 Answers3