Never play on PS4/PS3/Ps5

It's really just a markup language which is why it's -"XML."

 

Let me explain a little bit.

So a markup language isn't... code. It can't DO anything. It tells a program what to do.

So for example, it might say:

<addability name="Dodge" rank="1" target="%TARGET">

This says to add the ability Dodge, at rank 1, to the target of this effect.

The code then parses this, and says, "Alright, I know what code I need to run for addability, so I will do that, now I need the parameters, ok, you provided the correct parameters, so I can run this code."

So, in theory, a different game code, could understand addability or %TARGET differently and do something else.

This is similar to HTML, which is also an "ML" and is a markup language. It, too, does nothing on its own - instead, it gets parsed by browsers - and while it's more universal these days, in the past people would have to make websites and test them on different browsers because each of them handled some things slightly differently.

Even today there are differences:



In this case, it's mostly visual, but you can see how the same markup can result in things that are quite different to the end user.

~

An analogy would be like ordering a mac and cheese. The order is the markup code. You can take this order to various restaurants and they will do different things with that instruction. The chef, in this analogy, is the "code" and he reads the markup of "mac and cheese" and it's him that actually decides what that means.