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I stumble across XML documents intermittently and every time I need to review the basics again. This is a cheat sheet so that I can review it whenever I need to. Information here is a summarized form of the XML Tutorial

EXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language designed to describe data. It has no predefined tags and uses a Document Type Definition (DTD) or an XML Schema to describe the data. An XML document together with its DTD or XML Schema is self-descriptive.

XML uses text files to store data and can be used to create new languages e.g. WAP, WML, XHTML etc.

A simple XML document :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<note date="12/11/2002">
<to>Tove</to>
<from>Jani</from>
</note>

• The first line is an XML declaration which defines the XML version and the character encoding used in the document.

• XML tags are case-sensitive and must have a corresponding closing tag. Tags must be properly nested.

• An XML document must have a root element (note in the above). All elements may have child elements.

• XML documents can be extended by adding new element types. Implementations must ignore unknown element types.

• Whitespace is preserved. CR/LF is converted into just LF (UNIX format line terminators).

• <!– This is a comment –>

XML Elements can have attributes which must be either single or double quoted e.g. date in the above.

XML elements can have either

• Empty content
• Simple content(text ony)
• Element content (child elements)
• Mixed content (child elements and text)

XML element names can contain any character except for a space but must start with a letter and can't start with xml (in any case).