You can enter data in an XML file in two places:

• Inside the node, for example, <lastname>Jones</lastname>. In this example, Jones is the value of the node.

• As an attribute of a node, for example, employee id="120585". In this example, id is an attribute of the node. The attribute name is id and the value of the attribute is “120585”.

This node and value structure works well for simple data. If the data is more complex, however (for example, if it has special characters, or perhaps HTML code), you need to wrap these nodes in a CDATA container. You can do this by following this example:

<formula><![CDATA[6 > 5 and 5 < 6]]>
</formula>

CDATA tells the parser to ignore everything within the CDATA tag, so if you wrap text in CDATA, you can have HTML code, or any number of special characters within the value of the node.

The CDATA structure is as follows:

< ! [CDATA [your code]] >