Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Element Content Basics

The idea of element content is a pretty simple one, but also pretty important. Remember in Chapter 3 when we talked about what an element is, we mentioned that an element is more than just its name. An element's name is just the element type. The actual element consists of the start tag bearing its name, the end tag bearing that same name, and everything in between. The information between those tags is the content, and how that content is structured is the content model.

Just to keep things extensible and to lend structure to your documents, elements can have a few different types of content as we discussed earlier. They can have “element content” or “mixed content,” which can also be thought of as “text/PCDATA” content. ...