Reading the Specification

For all the effort that went into developing the draft of the 1.0 Recommendation, not much effort went into explaining the Recommendation to the lay person. That really is not the fault of the working group. They created a recommendation that is very concise, clear, and well-defined, leaving very little room for interpretation.

This is the sign of a well-constructed recommendation. It is clearly and formally defined so that anyone implementing XML does so with the same understanding of how XML documents are created and defined. This is the very core of what makes a successful standard.

However, that is not very comforting as you sit down to look at the XML 1.0 Recommendation, and you can't make any sense of it. If you ...

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