An element is a component of a document. Elements combine to organize the structure of a document. Elements can be made up of other elements, other types of data, or a descriptive representation that tells an XML parsing application about a resource that exists elsewhere than in the document.
Because it is extensible, XML empowers you to create your own elements. An element is made up of a start tag, an end tag, and data in between. (NOTE: start and end tags are also known as opening and closing tags.) The start and end tags describe the data within the tags, which is considered the value of the element. For example, the following XML element is a 'character' element with the value 'David Copperfield':
<character>David Copperfield</character>
The element name 'character' allows you to mark up the value 'David Copperfield' semantically, so you can differentiate that particular bit of data from another, similar bit of data. For example, there might be another element with the value 'David Copperfield':
<magician>David Copperfield</magician>
Because each element has a different tag name, you can easily tell that one element refers to David Copperfield, the character in a Dickens novel, while the other refers to David Copperfield, the magician. If there were no way to mark up the data semantically, having two elements with the same value could cause confusion.
In addition, XML tags are case-sensitive, so each of the following is a different element:
<City> <CITY> <city>
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