XML Development with Java™ 2

Components of XML

As stated in the section on the history of XML, XML is a formalization of rules for "marking up" documents with meta-data to convey extra information (the data's purpose) to the user. So, an XML-compliant document can be separated into markup and content. All markup starts with either an ampersand (&) or left angle bracket (<). There are six types of markup defined in XML. They are as follows: elements, attributes, comments, processing instructions, entity references, and CDATA sections.

• Elements— Elements are the most common aspect of markup languages. An element is a logical construct of a document. A normal element is composed of start and end tags that surround content, other elements, or both. The tags of an element are ...