Can someone explain .XML files to me? Or maybe an explanation on how I can read them.

Change the file extention to .txt


Now you can read it.

This does not appear to be working, I think. It seems to be jibberish.

E- if it's any help at all, my friend said that he is opening it with internet explorer, I have to do so with both IE and firefox and get the message:

XML document cannot be displayed on XSL style sheets.

Are you opening it with a text editor or some other program? Usually code environment editors'll understand xml markup. It should look a lot like HTML.

And XML is simply a markup language, sister to html, but used for categorizing information, rather than display. By itself, it holds no real meaning (as far as I know); think of it like a plugin or a database system.

For an example, a microsoft word document is not pure text. Rather it is a zip-like container file of several text and xml files. The text file contains "control characters" that calls to the XML sheets and the XML tells the program how to configure the text and display it to you.

You can actually see this if you have OpenOffice (because microsoft encrypts their document containers). Simply change the extension of a odt file to zip and extract it. You'll see the guts of the entire file.

Thats good to know for future reference, but I'm simply trying to read a chat log. I've tried:

Notepad
Wordpad
Microsoft Word
UltraEdit
Firefox
Internet Explorer

I am continuing to get the same outcome (ex):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type='text/xsl' href='MessageLog.xsl'?>
<Log FirstSessionID="1" LastSessionID="42">
<Message Date="12/19/2004"
Time="7:41:05 PM" DateTime="2004-12-20T00:41:05.852Z" SessionID="1"><From>
<User
FriendlyName="Venalis-It's hard to be perfect, When I know it just isn't worth
it."/></From>
<To>

E- changing the file extension hasn't been doing anything