Chapter 15. The XML language
Friendly Tutorial XML's central concepts are quite simple, and this chapter outlines the most important of them. Essentially, it gives you what you need to know to actually create XML documents. In subsequent chapters you will learn how to combine them, share text between them, format them, and validate them. Before looking at actual XML markup (don't worry, we'll get there soon!) we should consider some syntactic constructs that will recur throughout our discussion of XML documents. By syntax we mean the combination of characters that make up an XML document. This is analogous to the distinction between sounds of words and the things that they mean. Essentially, we are talking about where you can put angle brackets, quote marks, ampersands, and other characters and where you cannot! Later we will talk about what they mean when you put them together. After that, we will discuss the components that make up an XML document instance[1]. We will look at the distinction between the prolog (information XML parsers need to know about your document) and the instance (the representation of the actual document itself). [1] Roughly, what the XML spec calls the "root element". | 
