A vendor that supplies a Web server.

An application that exists in a distributed environment, such as the Internet. A Web service accepts a request, performs its function based on the request, and returns a response. The request and the response can be part of the same operation, or they can occur separately, in which case the consumer does not need to wait for a response. Both the request and the response usually take the form of XML, a portable data-interchange format, and are delivered over a wire protocol, such as HTTP.

Software that provides services to access the Internet, an intranet, or an extranet. A Web server hosts Web sites, provides support for HTTP and other protocols, and executes server-side programs (such as CGI scripts or servlets) that perform certain functions. In the J2EE architecture, a Web server provides services to a Web container. For example, a Web container typically relies on a Web server to provide HTTP message handling. The J2EE architecture assumes that a Web container is hosted by a Web server from the same vendor, so it does not specify the contract between these two entities. A Web server can host one or more Web containers.

An XML document that is syntactically correct. It does not have any angle brackets that are not part of tags, all tags have an ending tag or are themselves self-ending, and all tags are fully nested. Knowing that a document is well formed makes it possible to process it. However, a well-formed document may not be valid. To determine that, you need a validating parser and a DTD.

An interpreting version of XSLT.

An XML look-alike for HTML defined by one of several XHTML DTDs. To use XHTML for everything would of course defeat the purpose of XML, because the idea of XML is to identify information content, and not just to tell how to display it. You can reference it in a DTD, which allows you to say, for example, that the text in an element can contain and tags rather than being limited to plain text.