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document to determine its structural conformance. Once cleared for both syntactical
correctness and structural integrity, the parser presents the XML application with an in-
memory representation of the information.
Let’s take a look at each one of these in more detail.
XML Document
As we mentioned earlier, an XML document is based on entities that can consist of
content and markup. Content is the actual information, such as the price of melons, a
paragraph of an essay, or the headline of a newspaper. Content is also referred to as
character data
.
Content is encased in markup. If you are familiar with HTML, then you already know that
markup in the computer world consists of tags, such as start tags, end tags, and
comments. We go into much more detail later on in this chapter.
