XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Chapter 22. Schemas Reference

The W3C XML Schema Language (schemas) is a declarative language used to describe the allowed contents of XML documents by assigning types to elements and attributes. The schema language includes several dozen standard types and allows you to define your own custom types. The combination of the information in an XML document instance and the types applied to that information by the schema is sometimes called the Post Schema Validation Infoset (PSVI).

A schema processor reads both an input XML document and a schema (which is itself an XML document because the W3C XML Schema Language is an XML application) and determines whether the document adheres to the constraints in the schema. A document that satisfies all the schema’s constraints, and in which all the document’s elements and attributes are declared, is said to be schema-valid , although in this chapter we will mostly just call such documents valid . A document that does not satisfy all of the constraints is said to be invalid .