Stylus Studio XML Editor

Table of contents

Appendices

1.1 Purpose

Purpose

The [XML] specification defines limited facilities for applying datatypes to document content in that documents may contain or refer to DTDs that assign types to elements and attributes. However, document authors, including authors of traditional documents and those transporting data in XML, often require a higher degree of type checking to ensure robustness in document understanding and data interchange.

The table below offers two typical examples of XML instances in which datatypes are implicit: the instance on the left represents a billing invoice, the instance on the right a memo or perhaps an email message in XML.

dtdemo1 Data oriented Document oriented
11 
<invoice>
  <orderDate>1999-01-21</orderDate>
  <shipDate>1999-01-25</shipDate>
  <billingAddress>
   <name>Ashok Malhotra</name>
   <street>123 Microsoft Ave.</street>
   <city>Hawthorne</city>
   <state>NY</state>
   <zip>10532-0000</zip>
  </billingAddress>
  <voice>555-1234</voice>
  <fax>555-4321</fax>
</invoice>
 11 
<memo importance='high'
      date='1999-03-23'>
  <from>Paul V. Biron</from>
  <to>Ashok Malhotra</to>
  <subject>Latest draft</subject>
  <body>
    We need to discuss the latest
    draft <emph>immediately</emph>.
    Either email me at <email>
    mailto:paul.v.biron@kp.org</email>
    or call <phone>555-9876</phone>
  </body>
</memo>

The invoice contains several dates and telephone numbers, the postal abbreviation for a state (which comes from an enumerated list of sanctioned values), and a ZIP code (which takes a definable regular form). The memo contains many of the same types of information: a date, telephone number, email address and an "importance" value (from an enumerated list, such as "low", "medium" or "high"). Applications which process invoices and memos need to raise exceptions if something that was supposed to be a date or telephone number does not conform to the rules for valid dates or telephone numbers.

In both cases, validity constraints exist on the content of the instances that are not expressible in XML DTDs. The limited datatyping facilities in XML have prevented validating XML processors from supplying the rigorous type checking required in these situations. The result has been that individual applications writers have had to implement type checking in an ad hoc manner. This specification addresses the need of both document authors and applications writers for a robust, extensible datatype system for XML which could be incorporated into XML processors. As discussed below, these datatypes could be used in other XML-related standards as well.