Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Primitive Built-In Datatypes

The Schemas provide for two different types of datatypes: primitive datatypes and derived datatypes.

Primitive datatypes are defined within the Schemas Part 2: Datatypes section of the Recommendation, and the only way that new primitive datatypes can be introduced is through the W3C adding them to the official Recommendation.

The primitive datatypes included in the Recommendation are there for a number of reasons. First, these datatypes are datatypes that are already in common usage in other applications, such as databases and programming languages. Because of the likelihood that these common datatypes would be used in XML in addition to other computing applications, they were included in the Recommendation so that ...