Glossary

attribute

Attributes provide additional information about element that they appear in. They take the form of name-value pairs in the element. The emphasized parts of this example are attributes:

<author name="a.kernighan">
<resume id="r25a4">

element

An element of an XML document that defines an “object”, such as <resume> or <firstname>. HTML tags are examples of elements. Additionally, elements can have attributes. Elements have a start (or "open") tag (e.g., <firstname>) and an end (or "close") tag (e.g., </firstname>).

Each element (except for the root <resume>) has exactly one parent element and 0 or more child elements.

parent element

The element whose start tags and end tags surround a given element.

child element

Any element positioned between the start tags and end tags of a given element.