Assume the XML document has no CDATA sections, PIs, comments, or DOCTYPE.
1. You are shown just a slice of an XML document:
> some text (possibly whitespace) not containing the less than symbol </
That is, you see a greater-than symbol, some text, and then a less-than symbol followed by a forward slash. You are not shown the stuff before > nor the stuff after </
What is it? Does the slice signify an element: the part before > is the start tag, the part after </ is its end tag, and text is the content of the element?
You mean something like
<x
a="
> text without less than " b="2"> zzz </x
>
so the slice is "the end of an attribute value, some other attributes in a start tag, then element content followed by the start of an end tag".
David