What does an XML document actually look like?

The basic structure of XML is similar to other applications of SGML, including HTML. The basic components can be seen in the following examples.

An XML document starts with a Prolog of the required the XML declaration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

which specifies that this is an XML document; and an optional Document Type Declaration:

<!DOCTYPE report SYSTEM "http://sales.acme.corp/dtds/salesrep.dtd">

which identifies the type of document and says where the Document Type Description (DTD) is stored.

The Prolog is followed by the document instance:

• A root element, which is the outermost (top level) element (start-tag plus end-tag) which encloses everything else: in the examples below the root elements are conversation and titlepage.
• A structured mix of descriptive or prescriptive elements enclosing the character data content (text), and optionally any attributes ('name=value' pairs) inside some start-tags.

XML documents can be very simple, with straightforward nested markup of your own design:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<conversation>
  <greeting>Hello, world!</greeting>
  <response>Stop the planet, I want to get 
   off!</response>
</conversation>

Or they can be more complicated, with a Schema or Document Type Description (DTD) or internal subset (local DTD changes in [square brackets]), and an arbitrarily complex nested structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE titlepage 
  SYSTEM "http://www.google.bar/dtds/typo.dtd" 
[<!ENTITY % active.links "INCLUDE">]>
<titlepage id="BG12273624">
  <white-space type="vertical" amount="36"/>
  <title font="Baskerville" alignment="centered" 
   size="24/30">Hello, world!</title>
  <white-space type="vertical" amount="12"/>
	  <!-- In some copies the following 
           decoration is hand-colored, presumably 
           by the author -->
  <image location="http://www.google.bar/fleuron.eps" 
   type="URI" alignment="centered"/>
  <white-space type="vertical" amount="24"/>
  <author font="Baskerville" size="18/22" 
   style="italic">Vitam capias</author>
  <white-space type="vertical" role="filler"/>
</titlepage>

Or they can be anywhere between: a lot will depend on how you want to define your document type (or whose you use) and what it will be used for. Database-generated or program-generated XML documents used in e-commerce is usually unformatted (not for human reading) and may use very long names or values, with multiple redundancy and sometimes no character data content at all, just values in attributes:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ORDER-UPDATE AUTHMD5="4baf7d7cff5faa3ce67acf66ccda8248"
 ORDER-UPDATE-ISSUE="193E22C2-EAF3-11D9-9736-CAFC705A30B3"
 ORDER-UPDATE-DATE="2005-07-01T15:34:22.46"
 ORDER-UPDATE-DESTINATION="6B197E02-EAF3-11D9-85D5-997710D9978F"
 ORDER-UPDATE-ORDERNO="8316ADEA-EAF3-11D9-9955-D289ECBC99F3">
  <ORDER-UPDATE-DELTA-MODIFICATION-DETAIL ORDER-UPDATE-ID="BAC352437484">
    <ORDER-UPDATE-DELTA-MODIFICATION-VALUE ORDER-UPDATE-ITEM="56"
     ORDER-UPDATE-QUANTITY="2000"/>
  </ORDER-UPDATE-DELTA-MODIFICATION-DETAIL>
</ORDER-UPDATE>