a simpler document type definition language?

[Toivo Lainevool]

--- Jurg Wullschleger <Jurg.Wullschleger at mb.luth.se> wrote:
> the simplest form i can think of would look something like this: (examples
> in DTD syntax)
> there are only 4 types of elements:
> 
> - empty elements
> <!ELEMENT name1 EMTPY >
> 
> - elements that contain data
> 
> <!ELEMENT name2 (#PCDATA) >
> 
> - list elements
> 
> <!ELEMENT name3 (name1|name2|name3|name4)* >
> 
> - structural elements of a fixed length
> 
> <!ELEMENT name4 ((name1|name2),name3,name4,(name5|name6|name7)) >

I would go even simpler than that.  Don't allow nested brackets, #4 could be
represented like this:

<!ELEMENT name4 (nameA,name3,name4,nameB)>
<!ELEMENT nameA (name1|name2)>
<!ELEMENT nameB (name5|name6|name7)>

I recently wrote a quick and dirty DTD processor that generated java classes
for parsing valid XML documents, using this simplification in my DTDs made
things a whole lot easier.

Toivo Lainevool
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Thousands of Stores.  Millions of Products.  All in one place.
Yahoo! Shopping: http://shopping.yahoo.com

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)