KickStart Tutorial XML by Jan Kampherbeek - HTML preview

Well formed XML documents

Well formedness

An XML document needs to be well formed. Well formed means that the document applies to the syntax rules for XML.

The rules

To be well formed a document needs to comply to the following rules: it contains a root element
all other elements are children of the root element
all elements are correctly paired
the element name in a start-tag and an end-tag are exactly the same attribute names are used only once within the same element

Note

There are more rules, some of them have to do with entities. In this quick tutorial, entities are not covered.