Web and XML Glossary

Canonical XML refers to XML that is in canonical form. XML canonicalization is a process that generates the Canonical XML of a given XML document. XML specifies the syntax of XML documents. XML Namespaces specifies additional syntax and semantics for XML documents. Because of the syntax of XML, it is possible for XML documents which are equivalent for the purposes of many applications to differ in physical representation. For example, they may differ in whitespace occurrences, their entity structure, attribute ordering, and character encoding. Canonical XML establishes a method for determining whether two documents are identical, or whether an application has not changed a document, except for transformations permitted by XML and XML Namespaces.