Processing Instruction

Processing instruction (English processing instruction ) or control statement is a construct of SGML and XML to store data that is addressed to a specific ( XML ) application.

A processing instruction has the following XML syntax:

A processing instruction can record with the exception of the combination? > Any data. Frequently you will find in the data portion also pseudo attributes again, like an attribute - value pair look similar, but are not covered by the parser as such.

Although XML enables separation of content and presentation, there are still situations in which the user has no choice " soften up " than this. Therefore used for these cases often processing instructions to store layout information in an XML document, for example ( " insert here a page break "). Such programs or XSLT stylesheets can extract this information and initiate the appropriate action.

An XML declaration is not a processing instruction, even if it looks the same.

• XML
• Programming language element