Java and XML, Second Edition

Constraints

Next up to bat is dealing with constraining XML. If there’s nothing you get out of this chapter other than the rationale behind constraining XML, then I’m a happy author. Because XML is extensible and can represent data in hundreds and even thousands of ways, constraints on a document provide meaning to those various formats. Without document constraints, it is impossible (in most cases) to tell what the data in a document means. In this section, I’m going to cover the two current standard means of constraining XML: DTDs (included in the XML 1.0 specification) and XML Schema (recently a standard put out by the W3C). Choose the one best suited for you.

DTDs

An XML document is not very usable without an accompanying DTD (or schema). Just as XML can effectively describe data, the DTD makes this data usable for many different programs in a variety of ways by defining the structure of the data. In this section, I show you the most common constructs used within a DTD. I use the XML representation of a portion of the table of contents for this book as an example again, and go through the process of constructing a DTD for the XML table of contents document.

The DTD defines how data is formatted. It must define each allowed element in an XML document, the allowed attributes and possibly the acceptable attribute values for each element, the nesting and occurrences of each element, and any external entities. DTDs can specify many other things about an XML document, but these basics ...