XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Attribute Declarations

To make the fullName element more informative, it would be nice to add a language attribute to provide a hint as to how it should be pronounced. Although adding an attribute to an element sounds like a fairly simple task, it is complicated by the fact that elements with simple types (like xs:string) cannot have attribute values.

Attributes are declared using the xs:attribute element. Attributes may be declared globally by top-level xs:attribute elements (which may be referenced from anywhere within the schema) or locally as part of a complex type definition that is associated with a particular element.

To incorporate a language attribute into the fullName element declaration, a new complex type based on the built-in xs:string type must be created. To do this, three new schema elements must be used: xs:complexType , xs:simpleContent, and xs:extension:

<xs:element name="fullName">
  
  <xs:complexType>
    <xs:simpleContent>
      <xs:extension base="xs:string">
        <xs:attribute name="language" type="xs:language"/>
      </xs:extension>
    </xs:simpleContent>
  </xs:complexType>
  
</xs:element>

This declaration no longer has a type attribute. Instead, it has an xs:complexType child element. This element tells the schema processor that the fullName element may have attributes, but the xs:simpleContent element tells the processor that the content of the element is a simple type. To specify what type of simple content, it uses the base attribute of the xs:extension element to derive a new ...