Undoubtedly, sooner or later, users will encounter a variety of files that have the.xml extension. Not everyone, however, clearly imagines what it is and how to open XML files. Let's try to understand the main questions, the answers to which will give an understanding of the structure of the file and the possibility of opening it.
What is an XML file?
Let's start with the basics, because without understanding what exactly an XML file is, it will be impossible to choose a program to open or edit it.
In general, the.xml extension corresponds to a universal type of documents created using a special extensible markup language, which somewhat resembles the tools of the well-known HTML language, with the only difference that in such a document, the properties of an object or its description are determined by attributes and tags specified by manually.
You can find XML files anywhere today. These can be single databases, specialized lists of settingsprograms and applications or even entire web pages. In addition, such files are used to create, for example, movie or music catalogs. In this case, say, each film corresponds to one file, which contains attributes indicating the genre, release year, film studio, director's name, and in general - any information related to this film. There are no restrictions in the description.
Also, before deciding how to open an XML file, it should be noted that this standard was developed as a universal standard to enable the exchange of data between programs. In other words, today there is no single application for all cases that would open such a file by double clicking.
How to open XML files: the simplest solution
As it is already clear, the standard method of opening may not lead to anything. This is due only to the fact that several programs can be installed on the computer that can do this. In the best case, the system will prompt you to select the most suitable application, providing the user with a list of programs to choose from.
With the Internet, everything is clear. These files are not visible on the site, and the applet that opens them runs in the background, which the user does not see. As for the question of what is the easiest way to open XML files, the most common Notepad is perfect here. Yes Yes! It is he.
Just right-click on the file and select the "Open with…" command from the menu, after which we select the standard "Notepad". In general, such a simple discoverydue to the fact that files of this type, as well as HTML documents, contain only textual information.
But if the user does not know the basics of the eXtensible Markup Language, it is better not to deal with editing and then saving. Subsequently, specialized modules (especially if the source file contains a list of settings for some program) will give an error using the content in the application itself, that is, the component will be either damaged or inaccessible.
Programs that open XML files
Now let's see which applications can work with files of this type. In this case, we mean the operations of creating, editing and opening.
As already mentioned, XML is a text format, which means that the question of how to open XML files comes down solely to choosing an editor that recognizes such data.
The most suitable for such purposes will be programs in the form of Notepad (Notepad++ or something else), a regular Microsoft Word editor or similar Word Pad, specialized utilities with in-depth support for language syntax like XML Marker, XML Pad, Oxygen XML Editor, EditiX Lite Version and more.
By the way, you should pay attention to the fact that you can solve the problem by opening an XML file on a computer even using the Excel spreadsheet editor, which is included in the standard office suite. True, large files may not open. There is simply a limit on the numberlines.
Finally, for normal viewing, and not for editing content, you can open files of this type in any Internet browser like Internet Explorer, Opera, Google Chrome, etc.
Open XML email attachments
But there is often a problem of opening files of this type when they are contained in e-mail attachments, and in clients installed on the system (for example, Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook). Now we are not talking about mail servers.
Such applications are capable of giving open (read) errors, since the attachment is first saved in a special folder as a temporary file, and it is addressed to it when opened. To get out of such a difficult, as it seems to many, situation, it is enough to first save the attachment with the original extension in any convenient place, using the drop-down menu called by right-clicking on the file attached to the email message. After that, there should be no problems with opening in the same Notepad.
Conclusion
That, in fact, is all that concerns the question of how to open XML files. To summarize, it can be noted that the whole procedure is carried out quite elementarily using any, even the most primitive text editor or Internet browser. But if you need to edit it, it is better to use special utilities that can automatically check the syntax of the language, otherwise, if the structure of the same tag is violated, the file may simply turn out to bemeaningless character set, and a program that uses it as an additional means of saving settings will stop working altogether.
