Writing documentation with DocBook-XML 4.3

A tag always starts with a less-than character (“<”) and ends with a greater-than character (“>”).

Most tags are used in pairs, with content enclosed between a start tag and an end tag.

For example, major sections of a document are always enclosed between a <section> start tag and a </section> end tag.

The term element refers to a pair of tags and everything in between them.

A start tag has the form

<tag-name attributes>

and the end tag has the form

</tag-name>

where the tag-name is some name that describes what the tag does.

In some cases, you can specify optional attributes that modify the characteristics of the element. Each attribute has this form:

N="V"

or

N='V'

where N is the attribute's name and V is the attribute's value.

Here is an example of a start tag with attributes:

<section id="intro" status='draft'>

An empty element is a special element consisting of one tag. In this case, the tag must have a forward slash (/) just before the closing “>”. For example, the <colspec/> empty element describes the format of a table column in a table (see Section 12, “Tables”).

You can add whitespace (spaces, tabs, or line breaks) anywhere before or after an attribute, or before the closing “>”.