After studying this chapter and doing the exercises, you will be able to utilize these building blocks to create your own well-formed XML document. At the end of this chapter are self-review questions, exercises, and projects to server as a review of everything we have covered.
First let’s define what an XML document is. An XML document can represent any number of things, including an Excel spreadsheet, a quarterly financial report, a business letter, or the American League baseball standings. By viewing an XML document as hierarchical information grouped in categories, we then present these hierarchies in a tree-structured format. The tree paradigm allows us to define parent-child and sibling-sibling relationships. Let’s consider the diagram in figure 1.1