XML(1) Tags and Elements

example:

<name>
     <first>John</first>
     <middle>Fitzgerald Johansen</middle>
    <last>Doe</last>
</name>

In <first>John</first> ,

<first> is a start tag

</first> is a n end tag

<first>John</first> is an element

John is element content

In this case, the element content is referred to as parsed character data orPCDATA

you can a space between both <first and </first and their closing tags

so <first >John</first> is also a valid xml tag

Rule of naming Elements

Names can only start with letters or dash(_)

After the irst characcter,, numebrs, hyphens and periods are allowed.

No colon(:) is allowed.

Names can not start with letters xml, either uppercase or lowercase

Remember, tags in XML are case sensitive

White space stripping

For HTML

Any insignificant white space( multiple whitespace, new line, tab )  will be stripped down to one space.

to insert space, use &nbsp;

For XML

no whitespace stripping takes place for PCDATA, so all the whitespace are reserved.

End-of-Line Whitespace

XML parsers would change all new lines to a single linefeed character before processing. 

This makes data exchange among multiple computers running different operating systems that much easier, as programmers don't have to deal with the (sometimes annoying) end-of-line logic.

Empty tag

<br />

which is the same as <br></br>

<name first="John" middle="Fitzgerald Johansen" last="Doe"/>