Chapter 5. Document Models:A Higher Levelof Control

One of the most powerful features of XML is that it lets you create your own markup language, defining elements and attributes that best fit the information you want to encapsulate, instead of limiting you to an ill-fitting, general-purpose language. But what's still missing is a way to define the language in a formal way, to restrict the vocabulary of elements and attributes to a manageable set, and to control the grammar of elements. The process of formally defining a language in XML is called document modeling. In this chapter, we'll discuss two ways to model a document: document type definitions (DTDs), which describe a document's structure with declarative rules; and XML Schema, which describes the document's structure by example using element templates.

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