Real World XML

ANY

When you declare an element with the content model of ANY, it means that the declared element can contain any type of content—any element in the document as well as parsed character data. (Effectively, this means that the contents of elements you declare with the ANY content model are not checked by XML validators.)

Here's how you specify a content model of ANY:

<?xml version = "1.0" standalone="yes"?> 
<!DOCTYPE DOCUMENT [
<!ELEMENT DOCUMENT ANY>
]>
<DOCUMENT>
</DOCUMENT>

However, giving an element the content model ANY is often not a good idea because it removes syntax checking. It's usually far better to specify an actual content model, and I'll start doing that with a child list of elements.