Table of contents

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1.1 Origin and Goals

1.2 Terminology

1.3 Rationale and list of changes for XML 1.1

2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents

2.2 Characters

2.3 Common Syntactic Constructs

2.4 Character Data and Markup

2.5 Comments

2.6 Processing Instructions

2.7 CDATA Sections

2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration

2.9 Standalone Document Declaration

2.10 White Space Handling

2.11 End-of-Line Handling

2.12 Language Identification

2.13 Normalization Checking

3 Logical Structures

3.1 Start-Tags, End-Tags, and Empty-Element Tags

3.2 Element Type Declarations

3.2.1 Element Content

3.2.2 Mixed Content

3.3 Attribute-List Declarations

3.3.1 Attribute Types

3.3.2 Attribute Defaults

3.3.3 Attribute-Value Normalization

3.4 Conditional Sections

4 Physical Structures

4.1 Character and Entity References

4.2 Entity Declarations

4.2.1 Internal Entities

4.2.2 External Entities

4.3 Parsed Entities

4.3.1 The Text Declaration

4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities

4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities

4.3.4 Version Information in Entities

4.4 XML Processor Treatment of Entities and References

4.4.1 Not Recognized

4.4.2 Included

4.4.3 Included If Validating

4.4.4 Forbidden

4.4.5 Included in Literal

4.4.6 Notify

4.4.7 Bypassed

4.4.8 Included as PE

4.4.9 Error

4.5 Construction of Entity Replacement Text

4.6 Predefined Entities

4.7 Notation Declarations

4.8 Document Entity

5.1 Validating and Non-Validating Processors

5.2 Using XML Processors

Appendices

A.1 Normative References

A.2 Other References

B Definitions for Character Normalization

C Expansion of Entity and Character References

D Deterministic Content Models

E Autodetection of Character Encodings

E.1 Detection Without External Encoding Information

E.2 Priorities in the Presence of External Encoding Information

F W3C XML Working Group

G W3C XML Core Working Group

H Production Notes

I Suggestions for XML Names

1.1 Origin and Goals

Origin and Goals

XML was developed by an XML Working Group (originally known as the SGML Editorial Review Board) formed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996. It was chaired by Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems with the active participation of an XML Special Interest Group (previously known as the SGML Working Group) also organized by the W3C. The membership of the XML Working Group is given in an appendix. Dan Connolly served as the Working Group's contact with the W3C.

The design goals for XML are:

XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
XML shall be compatible with SGML.
It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
The XML design should be prepared quickly.
The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
XML documents shall be easy to create.
Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

This specification, together with associated standards (Unicode [Unicode] and ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO10646] for characters, Internet RFC 3066 [RFC1766] for language identification tags, ISO 639 [ISO639] for language name codes, and ISO 3166 [ISO3166] for country name codes), provides all the information necessary to understand XML Version 1.1 and construct computer programs to process it.

This version of the XML specification may be distributed freely, as long as all text and legal notices remain intact.

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