Defining Common Terms and Acronyms

XML is one of those technologies where you just cannot escape acronym. Table is a quick guide to some of the more commonly used terms and acronyms.

XML-Related Terms

Term	Definition
URI	Uniform Resource Identifier. An address to locate a resource on a network (for example, http://www.example.com).
URL	Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are subsets of URIs but today are considered synonymous with URIs.
W3C	World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/). An international consortium developing Web standards.
OASIS	Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (http://www.oasis-open.org/). An international consortium developing various standards.
ANSI	American National Standards Institute (http://www.ansi.org/). A private organization that creates standards for the computer and communications industries
ISO	International Organization for Standardization ( http://www.iso.org/). An international standards organization consisting of national standards bodies from around the world.
DTD	Document Type Definition. This is used within an XML document primarily for validation.
Parser	A processor that reads and breaks up XML documents. Validating parser can validate documents based on at least DTDs.
DOM	Document Object Model.
SAX	Simple API for XML.
XSLT	Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.
XPath	A language for addressing parts of an XML document.
REST	Representational State Transfer.
SOAP	This once stood for Simple Object Access Protocol. As of SOAP 1.2, though, this is no longer considered an acronym.