Table of contents

Appendices

2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents

A textual object is a well-formed XML document if:

1. Taken as a whole, it matches the production labeled document.

2. It meets all the well-formedness constraints given in this specification.

3. Each of the Text Entity which is referenced directly or indirectly within the document is Well-Formed.

Matching the document production implies that:

1. It contains one or more Element.

2. There is exactly one element, called the root, or document element, no part of which appears in the Content of any other element. For all other elements, if the Start-Tag is in the content of another element, the End Tag is in the content of the same element. More simply stated, the elements, delimited by start- and end-tags, nest properly within each other.

As a consequence of this, for each non-root element C in the document, there is one other element P in the document such that C is in the content of P, but is not in the content of any other element that is in the content of P. P is referred to as the parent of C, and C as a child of P.