Representing an XML tree

An XML document is encoded as a linear string of characters
It begins with a special processing instruction
Element occurrences are marked by start- and end-tags
The characters < and & are Magic and must always be "escaped"
Comments are delimited by
CDATA sections are delimited by <![CDATA[ and ]]>
Attribute name/value pairs are supplied on the start-tag and may be given in any order
Entity references are delimited by & and ;