November 2000
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 8m
English
Well-formedness sounds very stiff, and perhaps even a little mysterious. In practice, it's a very simple concept to implement; you simply have to be complete when writing your documents.
The formal definition of well-formedness, as used by the W3C, can be found in the XML 1.0 Recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210#sec-well-formed. It's a bit of a circular definition, saying that a well-formed document must:
Meet the definition of a document.
Conform to all well-formedness constraints mentioned in the XML Recommendation.
Any parsed entity referenced in the document also must be well-formed.
That helps, sort of, but still doesn't tell us what well-formed means. What comes next in this section ...
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