Table of contents

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1.1 Origin and Goals

1.2 Terminology

1.3 Rationale and list of changes for XML 1.1

2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents

2.2 Characters

2.3 Common Syntactic Constructs

2.4 Character Data and Markup

2.5 Comments

2.6 Processing Instructions

2.7 CDATA Sections

2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration

2.9 Standalone Document Declaration

2.10 White Space Handling

2.11 End-of-Line Handling

2.12 Language Identification

2.13 Normalization Checking

3 Logical Structures

3.1 Start-Tags, End-Tags, and Empty-Element Tags

3.2 Element Type Declarations

3.2.1 Element Content

3.2.2 Mixed Content

3.3 Attribute-List Declarations

3.3.1 Attribute Types

3.3.2 Attribute Defaults

3.3.3 Attribute-Value Normalization

3.4 Conditional Sections

4 Physical Structures

4.1 Character and Entity References

4.2 Entity Declarations

4.2.1 Internal Entities

4.2.2 External Entities

4.3 Parsed Entities

4.3.1 The Text Declaration

4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities

4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities

4.3.4 Version Information in Entities

4.4 XML Processor Treatment of Entities and References

4.4.1 Not Recognized

4.4.2 Included

4.4.3 Included If Validating

4.4.4 Forbidden

4.4.5 Included in Literal

4.4.6 Notify

4.4.7 Bypassed

4.4.8 Included as PE

4.4.9 Error

4.5 Construction of Entity Replacement Text

4.6 Predefined Entities

4.7 Notation Declarations

4.8 Document Entity

5.1 Validating and Non-Validating Processors

5.2 Using XML Processors

Appendices

A.1 Normative References

A.2 Other References

B Definitions for Character Normalization

C Expansion of Entity and Character References

D Deterministic Content Models

E Autodetection of Character Encodings

E.1 Detection Without External Encoding Information

E.2 Priorities in the Presence of External Encoding Information

F W3C XML Working Group

G W3C XML Core Working Group

H Production Notes

I Suggestions for XML Names

2.5 Comments

Comments

Comments MAY appear anywhere in a document outside other Markup; in addition, they MAY appear within the document type declaration at places allowed by the grammar. They are not part of the document's Character Data; an XML processor MAY, but need not, make it possible for an application to retrieve the text of comments. For Compatibility, the string "--" (double-hyphen) MUST NOT occur within comments. Parameter entity references MUST NOT be recognized within comments.

Comments

2.5 Comment ::= ''

An example of a comment:

<!-- declarations for <head> & <body> -->

Note that the grammar does not allow a comment ending in --->. The following example is not well-formed.

<!-- B+, B, or B--->

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