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# DebianDoc-SGML Manual
Chapter 2 - SGML markup and metacharacters

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:

`lt`

  less than sign (left angle bracket) `<`

`gt`

  greater than sign (right angle bracket) `>`

`amp`

  ampersand `&`

`copy`

  copyright symbol `©`

DebianDoc-SGML supports the full set of ISO entities as defined in the files `/usr/share/sgml/entities/*ml-iso-entities-*.*/ISO*`.

You can also use `&#number;` to refer to the character whose number is number (in ISO-LATIN-1). number should be in decimal.

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DebianDoc-SGML Manual