As entered in a text editor SGML document consists of text interspersed with tags denoting the start and end of elements.
Tags take the form <element> to start the element element and <element> to finish it.
There are some shorthands you can use: <element/contents/ specifies an element element with contents contents - but the contents may not contain a slash /. </> closes the innermost currently open element.
Some types of element start tag can have attributes; these appear inside the closing angle bracket, and are separated from the element name by whitespace. The attributes allowed in a particular element's start tag are described along with the element.
If you want to include SGML's markup characters (angle brackets < > and ampersands &) as text you must refer to them by name (this is called an entity reference in SGML-speak). &name; produces the character whose name is name.
Some useful character names are:
linuxdoc-sgml
, in linuxdoc-sgml
's
rep/latin1/general
file.
You can also use &#number; to refer to the character whose number is number (in ISO-LATIN-1). number should be in decimal.