Often attributes are used to pass information about the element and hence can be said to provide metadata for the element. A character is a single alpha, numeric, or punctation mark. All text characters that are not markup characters make up the character data of the document. The element containing other elements is known as the parent element.
Content is all data between the start tag and end tag of an element.
Content may be made up of markup characters and character data. See W3C Standards. A delimiter is a special character that marks the beginning and end of a string or text field. A document is a class of data object. A document in XML may be the text of a printed work.