Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework Kick Start

Writing Processing Instructions

XML provides the processing instruction as a means to pass information to an application that may parse the document. In the past, applications have abused comments and nonstandard tags to help out applications. For instance, HTML uses the META tag to tell search engines and other robots how the page should be indexed.

Instead of using nonstandard means to communicate with processing applications, you should write a processing instruction into your XML document. Processing instructions start with <? and end with ?>. Directly after the <? is an XML name that specifies the target of the processing instruction. This could be the name of the application that should use the processing instruction, or it could be a unique ...