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DTD vs. XML Schema

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.

AShocka writes "The W3C XML Schema Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of Requirements for XML Schema 1.1. Schemas are technology for specifying and constraining the structure of XML documents. The draft adds functionality and clarifies the XML Schema Recommendation Part 1 and Part 2. The XML Schema Valid FAQ highlights development issues and resources using XML Schema. This article at webmasterbase.com addresses the XML DTDs Vs XML Schema issue. Also see the W3C Conversion Tool from DTD to XML Schema and other XML Schema/DTD Editors."

2 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who needs XML when you got PXML? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Better yet, use S-Expressions.
    There are tons of parsers available.
    markup is simple:
    (this_is_the_tag
    this is all data
    (except_this_is_a_nested_tag with still more data))

    Even better still, there are customizable parsers available that can treat these S-Expression as data OR interpret them as program OR a combination of both. One such parser is called "Lisp". Once again, several implementations are available.
    Note that things like S-Expressions and Lisp have only been around for 40 years so you might want to give these technologies some time to mature.

  2. XML Schemas aren't just for validation by Osty · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can't believe nobody's mentioned this yet. Microsoft has a tool that will do several things:

    • Generate an XML Schema from an XDR or XML file.
    • Generate source code (C#, VB, or JScript) from an XSD file (XML Schema file).
    • Generate XML Schemas for one or more types in a given assembly file.

    This makes writing your XSD almost trivial. The code-generation capabilities are very powerful, as well, as you can generate runtime classes for serialization/deserialization or classes derived from DataSet so you can treat XML files like any other database, etc. It's very useful if you're doing any .NET framework programming.

    I'd be very surprised if there weren't other tools out there doing similar things. I simply mentioned xsd.exe because that's what I'm familiar with.