XSchema Spec Section 2.0 and 2.1, Draft 3

[Simon St.Laurent]

The third (and hopefully final) draft of sections 2.0 and 2.1 follows.  There 
was a mystery 2nd draft that I failed to post; it just removed entities from 
the spec.  This version adds the XSC:More extension element.  Both versions 
will be posted shortly at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xschema.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer / Cookies

2.0 XSchema Syntax

This section describes the XSchema document syntax. The XSchema document is an 
XML document containing a single XSchema element in which information 
describing the schema is nested. The XSchema element must be preceded by an 
XML declaration and may be preceded by other declarations, comments, and 
processing instructions.

2.1 The XSchema Element

The XSchema element is the root element for all XSchema documents. The 
declaration for the XSchema element is:

<!ELEMENT XSC:XSchema (XSC:Doc?, XSC:More?, (XSC:ElementDecl | XSC:Notation | 
XSC:Namespace | XSC:XSchema)*)>
<!ATTLIST XSC:XSchema
    Version CDATA #FIXED "1.0"
    MimeType CDATA "application/xml"
    FileExtension CDATA "xml">

The XSC:XSchema element contains other elements describing the XSchema and 
building a schema. These elements are described in later sections of this 
specification. The XSC:XSchema element may also contain other XSC:XSchema 
elements nested inside of it.

The XSC:XSchema element's attributes include information about the version of 
XSchema used as well as information about the type of documents created using 
the XSchema. 

XSchema version information, contained in the XSC:Version attribute, is 
critical to proper handling of documents should the specification be updated 
in the future. This specification is identified as version 1.0. Future major 
and minor versions of XSchema should identify themselves differently. No 
provision is made at this time for nesting XSchemas of different versions 
under a parent XSchema element.

The XSC:MimeType and XSC:FileExtension attributes are used to provide a 
suggested MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Content-type and file 
extension for documents created using a particular XSchema. Applications may 
use this information to identify XML document types. A document library that 
generates XML documents dynamically could assign file extensions and MIME 
types based on the XSchema used. 

Applications using this information should use the values stored in the first 
XSchema encountered during processing. For instance, if an XSchema includes 
another nested XSchema, the values for the XSC:MimeType and XSC:FileExtension 
attributes of the root XSchema should be used.

By default, most XML documents are assumed to have a MIME type of 
application/xml, as described in "XML Media Types" by E.J. Whitehead and 
Murata Makoto. Developers who need different MIME types for documents created 
using particular XSchemas may register other MIME types with the IETF, as 
described in RFC 1590, or use the 'x-' prefix syntax for subtypes, as 
described in RFC 1521.


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