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Document format

XML converter

An .xml file contains Extensible Markup Language: angle-bracketed tags you define yourself, arranged in a strictly nested tree. It is a meta-format — RSS feeds, SVG images, and Office documents are all XML underneath.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop XML files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where XML comes from

The W3C published XML 1.0 in 1998 as a radically simplified subset of SGML, aiming to bring structured documents to the web. It dominated data interchange through the 2000s — SOAP, RSS, configuration everywhere — before JSON displaced it for APIs, though it remains the backbone of document formats.

How XML works

  • Well-formedness is binary: one mismatched tag makes the document invalid, and conforming parsers must reject it.
  • Namespaces let independent vocabularies coexist in one document; XSD, Relax NG, and DTD schemas can validate structure.
  • The encoding is declared in the prolog, e.g. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>.
  • Elements, attributes, comments, CDATA sections, and processing instructions make it richer — and heavier — than JSON.

When to use XML

  • Build and platform configuration (Maven POMs, Android manifests).
  • Publishing pipelines built on DocBook, JATS, or TEI.
  • The internals of SVG, ODF, and OOXML files.
  • RSS and Atom feeds, plus SOAP-era enterprise integrations.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Rigorous validation against formal schemas.
  • Namespaces support mixing vocabularies safely.
  • A deep, mature toolchain: XPath, XSLT, XQuery.
  • Handles mixed document content (text with inline markup) better than JSON.

Limitations

  • Verbose — every element name is written twice.
  • Parser complexity around entities and DTDs has produced real vulnerabilities (XXE).
  • The attribute-versus-element choice breeds inconsistent designs.

Compatibility

Parsers exist in every programming language, browsers display raw XML as an expandable tree, and dedicated editors validate against schemas as you type. Operating systems treat it as plain text otherwise.

Convert XML to another format

Convert other formats to XML