XML Basics and FAQ
http://www.stc.org/confproceed/2001/PDFs/STC48-000164.PDF

Manning, Steve
STC Proceedings
2001

Abstract:

The World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for all web technologies, describes XML as a “method for putting structured data in a text file” (See www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points.. That’s accurate, but doesn’t really describe what XML is.