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Re: Singletons in a DTD

• From: terje@i... (Terje Norderhaug)
• To: "XML Developers' List" <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 10:40:08 -0700

At 8:46 AM 5/13/99, Joshua E. Smith wrote:
>I have an element which can contain 0 or more instances of some element
>types (call these collections), and 0 or 1 instances of others (call these
>singletons), and I don't want to contrain the order.
>
>If I have collections C1, C2, C3
>and I have singletons S1, S2, S3
>
>And I declare:
>
>(S1? , S2? , S3? , (C1 | C2 | C3)*)
>
>Then the singletons, if they appear, would have to be in that order and
>would have to be first.  So that's not what I want.
>
>I suppose I could declare some combinatorics:
>
>( S1? | S2? | S3? | (S1 , S2)? | (S2 , S1)? | (S1 , S3)? blah blah blah
>
>but I'd have to mix in the C1, C2, C3, etc., too, and I have about 8
>singleton classes, so this would quickly get totally out of control.
>
>Am I missing something, or is what I want to describe not really practical
>in a DTD?  I'm perfectly comfortable leaving the singletonness out of my
>DTD (my application will detect duplication errors anyway), if that's the
>only answer.  But if there *is* a way to capture this without waiting for
>XSchema to be finished, I'd love to hear it!

The AND '&' connector in SGML covered this functionality, but isn't
included in XML. It can thus easily be described in a DTD, just not an
*XML* DTD.


-- Terje <Terje@i...> | Media Design in*Progress

   Software for Mac Web Professionals at <http://www.in-progress.com>
   Take advantage of XML with Emile, the first XML editor for Mac.



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