Inside XML

Markup and Character Data

XML documents are made up of markup and character data. Binary data might contribute to XML documents some day, but there is no provision for enclosing binary data in a document made up of markup and character data yet; until there is, you refer to external binary data with entity references, as we'll see.

The markup in a document gives it its structure. Markup includes start tags, end tags, empty element tags, entity references, character references, comments, CDATA section delimiters (we'll see more about CDATA sections in a few pages), document type declarations, and processing instructions. So what's the character data in an XML document? All the text in a document that is not markup is character data.