General XML Syntax Rules

ATTENTION: THIS PAGE IS Valid HTML 5 AND IS BEST VIEWED WITH HTML 5 - Please upgrade your browser or download one of the HTML 5 compatible browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera or IE 9 (March 14, 2011 or later). For more information see HTML 5 browsers.

If you find this helpful, please click the Google Button to the left, if it is white, to make it turn blue. Thank you! (It also helps find this page again more easily.) If you don't see the +1 button, you may need to Join the +1 Experiment.

General Rules for Coding XML Documents

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet ...?>
<!DOCTYPE top-elem-name>
<top-elem-name ...>
   ...
</top-elem-name>

General rules for coding XML-based feeds

Certain special characters need to be escaped to avoid having the code interpreted as a delimiter or other special meaning:

escape all ampersand (&) characters
escape all ampersands with & to prevent them from being interpreted as XML character entities

escape all less than (<) symbols
escape all < symbols with < to prevent them from being interpreted as the starting delimiter of an XML tag

escape all greater than (>) symbols
escape all > symbols with > to prevent them from being interpreted as the ending delimiter of an XML tag

escape double quotes (") within double-quoted attributes
escape double quotes in attributes as "

escape apostrophes (') within single-quoted attributes
escape apostrophes (single quotes) in attributes as &apost;

escape special characters

escape other special characters using the appropriate decimal character code (&#nnn;) or hexadecimal character code (&#xnnnn;). For example, code a non-breaking space as either   or   (not  ).

Valid HTML 5