XSchema Spec Section 2.2, Draft 1

[Simon St.Laurent]

As usual, all comments, suggestions, rantings, etc. are welcome.  I'm having a 
hard time describing these very simple parts, so I'd especially appreciate 
terminology improvements.

Notes: I've expanded parameter entities and added namespace prefixes; 
otherwise this section (and content models and attributes, coming up next) are 
based entirely on John Cowan and Ron Bourret's combined DTD.  Anything 
prefixed and postfixed with ... is in italics in the HTML version.

The HTML version will be available shortly (as soon as AOL's servers stop 
giving me read-only filesystem errors, anyway) at 
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xschema.

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

2.2 Element Declarations

Element declarations in XSchemas are made using the XSC:ElementDecl element 
and its contents:

<!ELEMENT XSC:ElementDecl (XSC:Doc?, (XSC:Ref | XSC:Choice | XSC:Seq | 
XSC:Empty | XSC:Any | XSC:PCData | XSC:Mixed), XSC:AttDef*)>
<!-- id is the element name -->
<!ATTLIST XSC:ElementDecl XSC:id ID #REQUIRED >

The XSC:id attribute identifies the name of the element, and is required. An 
element declaration would look like:

<XSC:ElementDecl XSC:id="Species">
...additionalDeclarations... 
</XSC:ElementDecl>

This declaration would declare an element named "Species", which would appear 
in an instance as:

<Species>...content...</Species>

The XSC:id attribute must be unique, as it provides the name of the element as 
declared here, and is also used by other elements to refer to this element in 
their content model declarations. Note that an element must declare a content 
model, even if that content model is empty. Documentation (in the XSC:Doc 
element) and attribute declarations (using XSC:AttDef elements) are optional.

Documentation about the element, content-model information, and attribute 
information are stored as sub-elements of the XSC:ElementDecl element. 
Documentation is covered in 2.6.1, Documentation Extensions. Content Model is 
covered in 2.3, Content Model Declarations, and attributes are covered in 2.4, 
Attribute Declarations.


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