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Authoring Schemas With XSD

Posted by timothy on from the dare-unravels-with-his-usual-aplomb dept.

Dare Obasanjo points to his own "article on O'Reilly's XML.com that specifies a set of guidlelines for authoring schemas using the W3C XML Schema Definition language commonly abbreviated as XSD. The primary theme is embracing simplicity by showing how to avoid the more complex and esoteric features of the language."

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  1. Darn DTD's by HillClimber · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As someone who's just downloading the XML Mind editor and about to write an .xsd for my data -- this is great timing! Thanks, Dare.

    I also want to gripe a bit about the complexity of XML Schema. DTD has all the restrictions I'd typically want to use (the main thing I want to do is just specify element names, contents, and attributes). The *only* problem with DTD's is that they are totally namespace-challenged!

    You can't use combine two DTD's for different namespaces into a combo document. You can't even allow arbitrary other elements in a DTD element declaration -- every element must be declared and local. Even worse, you have to pick and stick with a namespace prefix in your DTD -- defeating the whole point of globally unique namespaces.

    What I *really* want is just DTD with a smidge of namespace smarts and the ability to combine DTD's for one document. Anyone want to give it a shot?