Summary

Although the code for many XML documents is somewhat self-explanatory, there are situations where it can be beneficial to provide additional information about XML code using comments or even temporarily disable XML code with comments. This hour showed you how to use comments, which allow you to make your code easier to understand. In addition to comments, you also learned how characters of text are encoded in an XML document. Although you might never change the character encoding scheme of your documents from the default setting, it is nonetheless important to understand why there are different encoding options.

After learning about comments and character encoding schemes, you spent the bulk of this hour getting acquainted with entities. You found out about parsed entities and unparsed entities, as well as the difference between internal and external entities. From there you learned the significance of notations and how they affect unparsed entities. Finally, the hour concluded with a practical XML application that allowed you to create an online radio driven by an XML document.