[Definition] Mirage: something that appears real or possible but is not in fact so.

Hi Folks,

Recently I used a text editor to open an XML document. Here’s what I saw:

<Document>

    <Greeting>Hello, world</Greeting>

</Document>

That is, at the top of the screen I saw:

<Document>

About a centimeter below I saw:

    <Greeting>Hello, world</Greeting>

And a centimeter below that I saw:

</Document>

It is a mirage.

There is no vertical dimension in the XML. The XML is just a linear list of symbols:

<Document>NL    <Greeting>Hello, world</Greeting>NL</Document>

The invisible characters I denote by NL.