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XML Basics


When I first heard about XML, I thought it was something similar to HTML. Needless to say, I was wrong. XML and HTML were designed with different goals. XML was designed to describe data and HTML was designed to display data. In this article we will try to learn some basics about XML. Then we will learn about DTD and XML schemas.

Author Info:
By: Mamun Zaman
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September 05, 2007
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
  1. · XML Basics
  2. · XML Tags and Conventions
  3. · More on Elements
  4. · XML Schema

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XML Basics - More on Elements
(Page 3 of 4 )

Some elements may appear several times and some may not appear. In DTD, this multiplicity can also be defined.

+ defines one or more times
* defines zero or more times
? defines an optional element, that is one or not at all

Some examples of multiplicity include:

<!ELEMENT Customer (Name, CardInfo+) > : A Customer can have a mandatory Name sub-element and one or more CardInfo sub-elements.

<!ELEMENT Name (FirstName, MiddleName?, LastName) > : FirstName and LastName will appear one time and MiddleName may appear or not.

<!ELEMENT Purchase (ItemNo, Title, Price)* > : A Purchase element may have several sub-elements which include ItemNo, Title and Price or none at all.

Here is the complete DTD declaration for our book example.

<!DOCTYPE bookstore [
      <!ELEMENT bookstore (book)*>

      <!ELEMENT book (title, author, year, price)>
      <!ELEMENT title (#PCDATA)>
      <!ATTLIST title id CDATA "0">
      <!ELEMENT author (#PCDATA)>
      <!ELEMENT year (#PCDATA)>
      <!ELEMENT price (#PCDATA)>
]>

DTD can be internal or external. Internal DTD means the definition, like the one above, would be specified after the XML processing instruction -- <?xml version="1.0" ?>. External DTD is a reference to an external definition like the one below.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">


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