Well-formed element
From Free net encyclopedia
In web page design, and generally for all markup languages based on SGML, such as HTML, XML, a well-formed element is one that is either
- opened and subsequently closed,
- an empty element, which in that case must be terminated,
and at the same time also is
- properly nested so that it does not overlap.
For example, in HTML: <b>word</b> is a well-formed element, while <i><b>word</i> is not, since the bold element is not closed. Empty elements (tags without text in between) can be closed by putting a slash at the end of the tag, i.e. <img />.