Element Markup

XML is a true markup language.  Compare that to HTML, which is more of a tag oriented language.  An XML element consists of a start tag, the element’s contents, and an end tag.  Remember, XML is case sensitive, so it is critical that you match both the spelling and the case in your start and end tags.  

<element.name>element contents</element.name>

An element can be empty.  A tag can be both a start tag and an end tag to an empty element if a slash (/) is used at the end of the tag.

<element.name/>

The following is a description of the parts of element markup.

Symbol	Description
<	Specifies the start of a tag.
>	Specifies the end of a tag.
/	Termination character.  Used by an end tag or an 
	empty element tag.