Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days, Second Edition

Structure and Syntax of XML

In this section, you will explore the syntax of XML and understand what is meant by a well-formed document.

NOTE

You will often encounter the terms “well-formed” and “valid” applied to XML documents. These are not the same. A well-formed document is structurally and syntactically correct (the XML conforms to the XML language definition, that is all tags have a correctly nested corresponding end tag, all attributes are quoted, only valid characters have been used, and so on), whereas a valid document is also semantically correct (the XML conforms to some external definition stored in an XML Schema or Document Type Definition). A document can be well-formed but may not be valid.

The best way to become familiar with the ...