‘A document may be well-formed but not valid.’ Explain this statement.
Q4. ‘A document may be well-formed but not valid.’ Explain this statement.
Ans. In XML, a document is said to be well-formed if it follows XML guidelines and uses descriptive tags. In other words, an XML document is considered well-formed if all the tags follow XML guidelines and are in their proper places in the document. The following guidelines help in creating a well-formed XML document:
- The document must contain at least one element
- Must have a root element
- Elements must contain the opening and closing tags
- Document must follow the correct tag order
- XML tags must be case-sensitive
- The values of the attributes must be in double quotes
On the other hand, a valid XML document is not only a well-formed document but also one that conforms to the DTD rules.
These rules help define the structure of XML documents with a list of valid elements.