Why Parse XML?
As you saw earlier in the book, XML is not HTML. In HTML, the processing agent—that is, the HTML browser—has a built-in knowledge of HTML, and it also probably has a built-in "dekludging" engine that allows it to make sense of the most horrific HTML syntax.
XML isn't SGML, either. In SGML there is always a DTD, so an SGML processing agent can look at the DTD and figure out how an SGML document should be rendered.
Because an XML document is designed to be a standalone document, it must contain all the resources that will allow an XML processing agent to successfully process it. These resources are the elements that make an XML document well-formed. For example, without an end tag, a parser would not be able to tell when it had ...
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