XML Element

Synonyms

XML element

Definition

An XML element is a markup element in the W3C XML recommendation [1] that consists of a beginning markup tag and an end tag with optional content and optional attributes.

Key Points

An XML element is a markup element in the W3C XML recommendation [1] that consists of a beginning markup tag and an end tag.

It has to have balanced begin- and end-tags as in this example

<element>content</element>.

XML elements can be nested as in

<e1>some optional text <e2>nested element</e2> some optional text</e1>

They can have XML attributes as in

<element attribute="value">content</element>

And they can be empty, meaning have no content as in

<element/>.

The structure of elements is free within the grammatical rules of [1], but elements can be constrained and typed by schema languages such as XML DTDs [1] or XML Schema [2].

An XML element is represented as an XML element information item in the XML Information Set [3] and an XML element node in the XPath and XQuery...