Date: Mar. 2, 2001
Link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnxml/chapter/ch02.html
Source Author or Organization: Erik T. Ray, O'Reilly & Associates

This tutorial article is a chapter from the O'Reilly & Associates book Learning XML, by Erik T. Ray.

It begins with the "10-minute overview of XML", a concise and clear illustration of document and tree structure. Utilizing the same example document as the 10-minute overview, the document prolog is dissected next, and its parts discussed. The author then introduces elements, container element syntax, empty elements, attribute syntax, and reserved attribute names. Ideas are reinforced with communicative graphics, including callouts of the main points.

The student then moves through a demystification of namespaces and a group by group explanation of entities. Next is a discussion of other markup objects, such as comments, CDATA sections and processing instructions, and a look at well-formedness. Lastly the author examines what makes good markup and markup languages, and walks through an annotated DocBook document as a positive example.