b . Commands or information contained within an XML document to be used by an application that is processing the document.
Information contained in an XML structure that is intended to be interpreted by a specific application.
An XML construct that can be used to embed hidden instructions in a document. Such instructions can provide information to a processor to affect the processor behavior or to apply formatting that cannot be specified with elements or attribute values.
An essentially arbitrary string preceded by a question mark and delimited by angle brackets that is intended to convey information to an application that processes an SGML instance. For example, the processing instruction ?linebreak might cause the formatter to introduce a line break at the position where the processing instruction occurs. In XML documents, processing instructions should have the form: ? pitarget param1="value1" param2="value2"? The pitarget should be a name that the processing application will recognize. Additional information in the PI should be added using " attribute syntax."
A processing instruction is a command passed to the document formatting tool. It starts with "?". This document uses processing instructions for naming files when it is rendered into HTML: ?dbhtml filename="file.html"
XML structural construct. A mechanism for embedding information in a file intended for proprietary applications rather than the XML parser or browser. The XML parser passes the instructions to the application. A processing instruction is a string of text included almost anywhere in an XML document's character data between ? and ? marks. It begins with the name of the application for which the PI is intended, followed by the data for the instruction. An example is the XMLdeclaration that begins every valid XML file: ?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"
A construct that provides information to the application processing the XML document. The instructions could instruct the application how, for example, to interpret the XML or display the results. Processing instructions can occur within elements or at the top level of a document. The first word of the processing instruction is called the target (its name) and every thing else is its object value. Example:?sort alpha-ascending