Each

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

document has exactly one single root element. It encloses all the other elements and is, therefore, the sole parent element to all the other elements. ROOT elements are also called document elements. In

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

, the root element is the element. The

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...

defines not only the specifications for XML itself, but also the DOM, which is a platform- and language-independent standard object model for representing XML documents. DOM Level 1 defines, for every XML document, an

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...

representation of the document itself and an attribute or property on the document called documentElement. This property provides access to an object of type element which directly represents the root element of the document. content There can be other XML nodes outside of the root element. In particular, the root element may be preceded by a ''prolog'', which itself may consist of an ''XML declaration'', optional comments,

processing instruction A Processing Instruction (PI) is an SGML and XML node type, which may occur anywhere in the document, intended to carry instructions to the application. Processing instructions are exposed in the Document Object Model as Node.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION ...

s and whitespace, followed by an optional ''DOCTYPE declaration'' and more optional comments, processing instructions and whitespace. After the root element, there may be further optional comments, processing instructions and whitespace within the document.The 'prolog' section of the W3C XML specification
/ref> Within the root element, apart from any number of attributes and other elements, there may also be more optional text, comments, processing instructions and whitespace. A more expanded example of an XML document follows, demonstrating some of these extra nodes along with a single rootElement element. .html" ;"title="!ENTITY copy "©">">!ENTITY copy "©">

References

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