- 4 - XML Explained Michael Broberg/Lalith Reddy, Jun 2000 © 2001 Sixhills Consulting Ltd & Author <ItemDescription>Super Party Poppers &trademark;</ItemDescription> <Quantity>100</Quantity> <Deliver>19991121</Deliver> </Item> </Order> The first line of the message indicates it is an XML message, and which version of XML it conforms to. The second line of the message identifies the document type definition that has been used to validate the structure of the message. The outward pointing angle brackets are the delimiters that separate XML mark-up from contents. The first word within each set of angle brackets indicates the name of the XML element. The word before each = sign represents an attribute name, and text between quotes following the = sign represents the attribute value. Text not between angle brackets represents element content. The name between “&” and “;” in the fifth from last line identifies a reference to an entity whose replacement text will be the trademark symbol. XML documents can be transformed into displayable formats such as HTML or PDF using a standard known as the XSLT (Extensible Style Language Translation) standard. An example would be the generation of a purchase order from an XML document on a WWW browser using this standard.
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