XML DTD vs. XML-Data

[Tiago Moitinho de Almeida]

I am developing an application for editing and validating formal metadata
documents, which is XML-based.
The metadata documents follow a structure which is represented by a DTD.
The application is DTD-deriven. It should work with any valid DTD, so it does
not depend on a specific DTD.


1.
Two important issues about the validation are:
- data type checking (ex: the content of <date> tags should have a valid date
format)
- validity domains  (ex: for the content of <primary_colour> I should only
accept "blue", "red" or "green").

As far as I undertand, XML-Data provides solution for the 1st issue, and I can
work arround it in a DTD using a #FIXED attribute for those element
declarations.

However, I don´t see how XML-data or XML DTD provide information to meet the 2nd
issue.


2.
2 questions about XML DTD's and XML-Data:
- Can I use DTD to do everything that XML-Data does?
- Using XML-Data, can I somehow get rid of XML DTD's?


Thanks.

Tiago Moitinho, Lisbon, Portugal
tma at chiron.pt


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 (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe 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)