Extensible Markup Language is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format, both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML. The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity and usability across the Internet, it is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for different human languages. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, the language is used for the representation of arbitrary data structures such as those used in web services. Several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages, while programmers have developed many application programming interfaces to aid the processing of XML data; the essence of why extensible markup languages are necessary is explained at Markup language and at Standard Generalized Markup Language. Hundreds of document formats using XML syntax have been developed, including RSS, Atom, SOAP, SVG, XHTML.

XML-based formats have become the default for many office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, Apple's iWork. XML has provided the base language for communication protocols such as XMPP. Applications for the Microsoft. NET Framework use XML files for configuration, property lists are an implementation of configuration storage built on XML. Many industry data standards, such as Health Level 7, OpenTravel Alliance, FpML, MISMO, National Information Exchange Model are based on XML and the rich features of the XML schema specification. Many of these standards are quite complex and it is not uncommon for a specification to comprise several thousand pages. In publishing, Darwin Information Typing Architecture is an XML industry data standard. XML is used extensively to underpin various publishing formats. XML is used in a Service-oriented architecture. Disparate systems communicate with each other by exchanging XML messages; the message exchange format is standardised as an XML schema.

This is referred to as the canonical schema. XML has come into common use for the interchange of data over the Internet. IETF RFC:3023, now superseded by RFC:7303, gave rules for the construction of Internet Media Types for use when sending XML, it defines the media types application/xml and text/xml, which say only that the data is in XML, nothing about its semantics. RFC 7303 recommends that XML-based languages be given media types ending in +xml. Further guidelines for the use of XML in a networked context appear in RFC 3470 known as IETF BCP 70, a document covering many aspects of designing and deploying an XML-based language; the material in this section is based on the XML Specification. This is not an exhaustive list of all the constructs that appear in XML. Character An XML document is a string of characters; every legal Unicode character may appear in an XML document. Processor and application The processor analyzes the markup and passes structured information to an application; the specification places requirements on what an XML processor must do and not do, but the application is outside its scope.

The processor is referred to colloquially as an XML parser. Markup and content The characters making up an XML document are divided into markup and content, which may be distinguished by the application of simple syntactic rules. Strings that constitute markup either begin with the character < and end with a >, or they begin with the character & and end with a. Strings of characters that are not markup are content. However, in a CDATA section, the delimiters <!> are classified as markup, while the text between them is classified as content. In addition, whitespace before and after the outermost element is classified as markup. Tag A tag is a markup construct that begins with < and ends with >. Tags come in three flavors: start-tag, such as <section>. Element An element is a logical document component that either begins with a start-tag and ends with a matching end-tag or consists only of an empty-element tag; the characters between the start-tag and end-tag, if any, are the element's content, may contain markup, including other elements, which are called child elements.

An example is <greeting>Hello, world!</greeting>. Another is <line-break />. Attribute An attribute is a markup construct consisting of a name–value pair that exists within a start-tag or empty-element tag. An example is <img src="madonna.jpg" alt="Madonna" />, where the names of the attributes are "src" and "alt", their values are "madonna.jpg" and "Madonna" respectively. Another example is <step number="3">Connect A to B.</step>, where the name of the attribute is "number" and its value is "3". An XML attribute can only have a single value and each attribute can appear at most once on each element. In the common situation where a list of multiple values is desired, this must be done by encoding the list into a well-formed XML attribute with some format beyond what XML defines itself; this is either a comma or semi-colon delimited list or, if the individual values are known not to contain spaces, a space-delimited list can be used. <div class="inner greeting-box">Welcome!</div>, where the attribute "class" has both the value "inner greeting-box" and indicates the two CSS class names "inner" and "greeting-box".

XML declaration XML documents may begin with an XML declaration that describes some informatio

Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word, in a situation in which gender is unknown or irrelevant. These arise in generalizations and are common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse. Examples include "readers of Wikipedia appreciate their encyclopedia," "the customer who spends in this market." The question of appropriate style for using pronouns to refer to such generic antecedents in the English language became politicized in the 1970s, remains a matter of substantial dispute. Many languages share the following issue with English: the generic antecedent is a representative individual of a class, whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, but pronouns are gender-specific. In languages such as English that distinguish natural gender in pronouns but not grammatical gender in nouns masculine, but sometimes feminine, forms of pronouns are used for the generic reference, in what is called the generic usage of the pronoun; the context makes the generic intent of the usage clear in communication.

Example: An ambitious academic will publish as soon as she can. Unless there is reason to believe the speaker thinks ambitious academics are always female in the relevant context, the use of she in this sentence must be interpreted as a generic use. Traditionally both he and they were used for this purpose but since the nineteenth century, English style guides have recommended the otherwise masculine he as a singular generic pronoun. Since the middle of the twentieth century the use of he for this purpose has been discouraged because use of he is perceived as subtly biasing the listener to assume the antecedent is masculine. Various alternatives have been proposed. In French both the singular and plural pronouns in the third person are marked for grammatical gender, the antecedent always has grammatical gender; the masculine form of "they", ils, is always used when referring to a plural and grammatically masculine antecedent, while for plural antecedents that are grammatically feminine the feminine form elles of "they" is used.

In the singular the third person pronoun il is used to refer to grammatically masculine antecedents and elle is used to refer to grammatically feminine antecedents. Thus, for both generic and non-generic antecedents, the natural gender of the antecedent, whether known or unknown, is irrelevant, as the deciding factor for the choice of a referring pronoun is the grammatical gender of the antecedent; some French speakers advocate the use of created gender-free pronouns, such as illes or els for ils et elles and celleux or ceulles for celles et ceux. In spoken Mandarin Chinese, in the pinyin form of writing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet, there is no distinction between "he" and "she", nor is there a distinction between "they" and "they". However, when Mandarin is written in characters, a gender distinction is made: tā is written as 他 or 她 for "he" or "she" with -men added for the plural. For a plural generic antecedent such as "people", the referring pronoun will always be written as the masculine plural form unless the generic group is known to be inherently female, in which case the feminine form is used.

For a singular generic antecedent such as "someone", the referring pronoun is always written as the masculine singular form unless the generic antecedent is known to be inherently female. If an antecedent is a thing, either specific or generic, rather than a person, the appropriate pronoun to refer back to it is it, no difficulty arises. If the antecedent is more than one thing, again either specific or generic, the pronoun they is used to refer back to them, again no difficulty arises; when the antecedent is a specific person, the correct referring pronoun is either he or she, depending on the person's gender. When the antecedent is a specific group of two or more people, the pronoun they is used, again without any difficulty arising, and when the antecedent is generic and plural, again the pronoun they is used and is not problematic, because they is not gender-specific. But difficulty arises in choosing a singular pronoun to refer to a unspecified human. In particular, the overlap of generic use with gender role stereotyping has led to controversy in English.

A nurse should ensure. A police officer should maintain his fitness. A dancer should watch her diet carefully. A boss should treat his staff well. In these examples, some speakers might mean that all nurses are female, or that all bosses are male, while others might intend the pronouns as generic and hence gender-unspecific. Ambiguity arises from the possibility that the listener might interpret the meaning differently from what the speaker intended. Speakers of all languages use words both to make distinctions and to generalize: Example of distinction: My mother thinks... but my father says.... Example of generalization: Parents believe.... Example of generalization: Any parent believes.... What has become controversial among users of English is the choice of pronoun to refer back to a generalized, hence generic, singular antecedent such as any parent, or every parent. Examples of accepted and impossible constructions in English include: All people get hungry, so they eat. Acceptable (All people

The Process of Belief Tour was a concert tour by punk band Bad Religion in support of their album, The Process of Belief. This tour marks the first tour since the Recipe for Hate Tour with guitarist Brett Gurewitz, who re-joined the band in 2001, after The New America Tour and the first tour with new drummer Brooks Wackerman, who replaced Bobby Schayer after his shoulder injury rendered him unable to play drums, professionally. Both Gurewitz and Wackerman made their debuts with the band on December 8, 2001 at the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas at the Universal Amphitheater. Due to Gurewitz's commitment as Head of Epitaph, he was unable to tour with the band outside of California, but did travel with them for the first two promo legs of this tour. Greg Graffin – VocalsBrett Gurewitz – Guitar and back-up vocals Brian Baker – Guitar and back-up vocalsJay Bentley – Bass and back-up vocalsGreg Hetson – GuitarBrooks Wackerman – Drums