XML in Office 2003: Information Sharing with Desktop XML

Chapter 15. The XML language Friendly Tutorial

• Syntactic details

• The prolog and the document instance

• XML declaration

• Elements and attributes

XML’s central concepts are quite simple, and this chapter outlines the most important of them. Essentially, it gives you what you need to know to actually create XML documents. In subsequent chapters you will learn how to combine them, share text between them, format them, and validate them.

Before looking at actual XML markup (don’t worry, we’ll get there soon!) we should consider some syntactic constructs that will recur throughout our discussion of XML documents. By syntax we mean the combination of characters that make up an XML document. This is analogous to the distinction between sounds of words and the ...