XML Tutorial
Lesson 1: Authoring XML Elements

September 4, 1998

What is an XML element?

XML is a markup language. An XML element is made up of a start tag, an end tag, and data in between. The start and end tags describe the data within the tags. The data within the tags is considered the value of the element. For example, the XML element below is a "director" element with the value of "Ed Wood":

<director>Ed Wood</director>

The element name ("director") allows you to mark up the value "Ed Wood" semantically, so you can differentiate that particular bit of data from another, similar bit of data. For example, there may be another element with the value of "Ed Wood":

<actor>Ed Wood</actor>

Because each element has a different tag name, we can easily tell that one element refers to Ed Wood the director of Jail Bait, while the other refers to Ed Wood the lead actor in Glen or Glenda. If we could not mark up the data semantically, having two elements with the same value might cause some confusion.

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