XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Elements

XML allows documents to be decomposed into smaller, meaningful elements that can be recognized and, when required, processed as individual units. This concept is at the heart of the XML standard. Every XML document must contain at least one element, and the first element always identifies and encloses the entire document. But most documents contain many elements. Indeed, XML documents often consist of either nothing but elements, or of a mixture of elements and text.

Container elements

The term container element is used to describe an element that encloses the data it identifies. Such an element is comprised of three parts: a start-tag, an end-tag and the data between these tags. This data is known as the element content. The element ...