Comments

XML comments are very much like HTML comments. You can use comments to include explanatory notes in your document that are ignored by XML parsers; comments may appear anywhere in a document outside other markup. As in HTML, you start a comment with <!-- and end it with -->. Here's an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<DOCUMENT>
    <!--Start the document off with a greeting.-->
    <GREETING>
    <!--Here's the greeting's text.-->
        Hello from XML!
    </GREETING>
</DOCUMENT>

You should follow a few rules when adding comments to an XML document. Comments must not come before an XML declaration; for example, this is incorrect:

 <!--Here's my document.--> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <DOCUMENT> <GREETING> Hello from XML! </GREETING> ...

Get Inside XML now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.