How to work with XML documents?

[Nudedragon]

I have no idea how to work with XML files. I've tried to find tutorials, but most of them are working with word, and their version of word is 6 or 10 years out of date. I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction? I just want to see how they work, and possibly tweak a few things.

 

So, could anyone help me view and edit XML files? Even an up to date tutorial link would be appreciated.

[DrakeTheDragon]

What's your trouble with it? XML is a rather basic straight-forward coding structure similar to HTML and can be edited by everything able to open a plain text file.

I'm using Coda, or Text Edit. Windows' Editor or Wordpad will be fine as well. You can open an XML file with just about everything, because it is a simple plain text file. There shouldn't be any encoding or encryption in place either.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/

 

What tags you can use inside it heavily depends on what application the XML file you're editing is intended for. Which is something you also haven't mentioned so far.

 

edit: Coming to think of it, as you used the impossible combination of "XML" and "unintelligible" in the same sentence, I'm led to believe it's the file's encoding ("UTF-8", a.k.a. "Unicode") which is causing you trouble, as not all editors can always already open it fine from the start. However, this will only cause trouble with special characters. Everything a-z, A-Z and 0-9 cannot be affected by it.

Edited June 23, 2013 by DrakeTheDragon

[Nudedragon]

Hmm, guess I was overthinking it, then! When I opened it in word or notepad the formatting was gone, so by unintelligible, I meant that too much information was missing. Wordpad seems to work, though, so thanks!