Other Characteristics of Well-Formedness

This section covers the well-formedness constraints as they apply to areas other than elements and attributes. Several of the well-formedness rules will make more sense after you have read Chapters 4 and 5.

Comments

To be well formed, XML comments must not end with the character sequence --->. A legal XML comment ends with -->— that is, two dashes and a greater than character.

Entities Must Be Declared

If a reference to an entity is present in an XML document and any of the following are true, any entity referenced must be declared:

  • There is no Document Type Definition (DTD).

  • A document has only an internal DTD subset with no parameter entity references.

  • The value of the standalone attribute in the XML ...

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