Real World XML

#PCDATA

Say that we want to let the <CUSTOMER> element store some plain text—in particular, say that we want to store the name of a customer. All nonmarkup text is referred to as parsed character data in a DTD, and it's abbreviated as #PCDATA in element declarations. Parsed character data explicitly means text that does not contain markup; it's just simple character data.

The parsed character data is where you store the actual content of the document as plain text. Note, however, that this is the only way to specify the content of the document using DTDs. You can't say anything more about the actual type of content.

For example, even though you might be storing numbers, that data is only plain text as far as DTDs are concerned. This lack of precision ...