Financial Services Markup Language (FSML)

The Financial Services Markup Language (FSML) is a standard for representing financial data in a machine-readable format. It is designed to facilitate the exchange of financial data between financial institutions and other organizations. FSML is based on the XML family of markup languages and uses a number of XML-based technologies, such as XSLT and XPath, to provide a flexible and extensible framework for representing financial data.

What is a markup language?

A markup language is a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. The idea is that the markup language can be used to add additional information to the document that can be used to change its appearance or to specify how it is to be processed.

There are a wide variety of markup languages in existence, with different levels of complexity. Some, like HTML, are designed to be relatively easy to learn and use, while others, like XML, are designed to be more flexible and powerful but require a more sophisticated understanding to use effectively. Is the standard markup language? No, the standard markup language is not a programming language.

Why are markup languages important?

Markup languages are important because they provide a way to annotate documents in a way that is both human-readable and machine-readable. This makes them very useful for a variety of tasks, such as:

- Generating documents from data: By annotating data with a markup language, it becomes much easier to automatically generate well-formatted documents from that data. For example, a database of product information can be easily turned into a nicely-formatted product catalog, simply by adding the appropriate markup tags.

- Manipulating documents: Once a document is annotated with a markup language, it becomes much easier to write programs to manipulate that document. For example, a program can be written to extract all of the headings from a document, or to automatically generate a table of contents.

- Sharing documents: Markup languages also make it possible to easily share documents between different applications. For example, a document written in Microsoft Word can be saved in HTML format, which can then be viewed in a web browser.

Why XML is called markup language?

XML is called a markup language because it uses tags to mark up (i.e., identify) pieces of information in a document. For example, an XML document might use tags to mark up a person's name, address, and phone number.

The key thing to remember about XML is that it is a flexible way to represent information. The tags that you use to mark up your information are not predefined - you can make up your own tags, as long as they are properly formatted (i.e., they follow the XML syntax rules).

This flexibility is one of the main reasons why XML is so popular. It allows you to represent information in a way that makes sense for your application, without being constrained by the way someone else has decided to do it. What is the most common markup language? The most common markup language is HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications.