An Update Article in XML

XML data consist of sections called elements annotated with attributes. Shown above is part of a Directions on Microsoft Update article encoded in a hypothetical XML format. Angle-bracketed tags (e.g., <article>…</article>) mark off elements. Attributes (e.g., issue=”2002-01-01″) in an element’s start tag define properties of that element; for example, the “issue” and “deadline” attributes of the “article” start tag give the article’s planned publication date and the deadline for completing it.

All XML data must be text (specifically, printable Unicode characters), so the graphic used in the article above is stored in separate files whose names appear in the article’s XML. An alternative would be to encode the graphic in a character encoding (such as the base64 encoding used in e-mail) and include it in the XML.