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Re: a simpler document type definition language?

• From: Toivo Lainevool <tlainevool@y...>
• To: Jurg Wullschleger <Jurg.Wullschleger@m...>, 'xml-dev' <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 17:40:00 -0800 (PST)

--- Jurg Wullschleger <Jurg.Wullschleger@m...> wrote:
> the simplest form i can think of would look something like this: (examples
> in DTD syntax)
> there are only 4 types of elements:
> 
> - empty elements
> <!ELEMENT name1 EMTPY >
> 
> - elements that contain data
> 
> <!ELEMENT name2 (#PCDATA) >
> 
> - list elements
> 
> <!ELEMENT name3 (name1|name2|name3|name4)* >
> 
> - structural elements of a fixed length
> 
> <!ELEMENT name4 ((name1|name2),name3,name4,(name5|name6|name7)) >

I would go even simpler than that.  Don't allow nested brackets, #4 could be
represented like this:

<!ELEMENT name4 (nameA,name3,name4,nameB)>
<!ELEMENT nameA (name1|name2)>
<!ELEMENT nameB (name5|name6|name7)>

I recently wrote a quick and dirty DTD processor that generated java classes
for parsing valid XML documents, using this simplification in my DTDs made
things a whole lot easier.

Toivo Lainevool
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