Learning XML

D

declaration

A special object that configures the environment of the document. It may introduce a new element, create an entity, or name the type of document. Declarations use a special delimiter to keep them apart from elements, adding an exclamation mark to the opening angle bracket:

<!name
						statement>

where name is the type of declaration, and statement contains the rest of the required information to make a declaration. See also markup.

delimiter

Any character or group of characters that separates data or markup. The angle brackets in XML tags (<>) are delimiters. CDATA sections have three delimiters: <![, [, and ]]>. See also markup.

document

In XML, a document is a complete root element, after all external entity references have been resolved. At most, it has one optional XML declaration and one document type definition. The document may be distributed across many files, perhaps on different systems. See also document element, root element.

document element

Also called the root element, the document element is the outermost element in a document. It contains everything except the document prolog and any comments or processing instructions outside of it. See also document, root element.

document instance

An actual document that conforms to a general document model. See also document, DTD.

document model

A template for a document that defines elements and their content models. A DTD or a schema is a document model. See also DTD, schema.

DOM (document object model)