Strategic XML

All About Elements

The most important (and frequently encountered) type of markup is the element tag. An element consists of an element open tag (for example, <name>), which is possibly followed by character data and additional elements, and an element close tag (</name>). Unlike HTML, XML requires that element open and close tags must match. This means that if an element begins with a <name> tag, it must end with a matching </name> closing tag. Mismatched tags will generate a well-formedness error (like a syntax error) in an XML parser. For example, the following tag sequence would generate an error if it were used in an XML document:

<p>This is the first line,<br>and this is the second.</p>

Although this is a perfectly valid HTML tag sequence, ...