Strategic XML

Element Declarations

Now that you know how to associate element and attribute declarations with a document, you need to understand what these declarations look like.

The <!ELEMENT> markup tag is used to declare what type of content is permitted for a particular element. For example, the following declaration from restaurant.dtd defines the markup that can appear inside an <item> element:

<!ELEMENT item (name, price, note?)?>

The first token following the <!ELEMENT> markup is the name of the element being declared (in this case, item). Following the name is either a simple regular expression that dictates the contents of the element, or a special keyword such as ANY (the element may contain any combination of other elements and text) or EMPTY ...