[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] XSchema Spec - Attribute Declarations (Section 2.4), Draft 4
At long last, here is the revised Attribute Declarations section. Note that it provides for attributes to be declared outside of XSC:ElementDecl elements, and uses attributes instead of child elements to make its declarations. I also gave XSC:AttDef an id attribute. This draft underwent some drastic changes based on XML-Dev discussions; I'm suspecting that there are more mistakes in here than usual. Please read it closely. There are some changes in other sections that need to be made, like Name vs. name as an attribute for XSC:ElementDecl. As always, a prettier HTML version of this will be posted shortly at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/xschema. Simon St.Laurent Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer / Cookies 2.4 Attribute Declarations 2.4.1 Overview Attribute declarations are made with empty XSC:AttDef elements. XSC:AttDef elements may be nested inside of XSC:ElementDecl element declarations or linked to element. The data type of an attribute is defined with an attribute, as is a declaration of whether or not it is required and a possible default value. <!ELEMENT XSC:AttDef (XSC:Doc?, XSC:More)> <!ATTLIST XSC:AttDef Name NMTOKEN #REQUIRED Element NMTOKEN #IMPLIED id ID #IMPLIED Type (CData | ID | IDRef | IDRefs | Entity | Entities | Nmtoken | Nmtokens | Notation | Enumerated) "CData" Required (Yes | No) "No" Fixed (Yes | No) "No" Enumeration NMTOKENS #IMPLIED AttValue CDATA #IMPLIED> In XSchema 1.0, an attribute declaration (XSC:AttDef element) may be nested within the element declaration (XSC:ElementDecl element) for the element to which the attribute belongs. If the XSC:AttDef element appears nested inside an XSC:ElementDecl element, the Element attribute must be ignored. If the XSC:AttDef element appears nested under the XSC:XSchema element, the Element attribute should contain a name token corresponding to the Name attribute of the element to which this attribute applies. The Name attribute of the XSC:AttDef element provides the name by which the attribute will be identified. A nested declaration is shown below. <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef Name="status" ...additionalAttributeInformation.../> </XSC:ElementDecl> This declares an element with the name Species that has an attribute named status. If the status attribute was declared outside of the Species element declaration, the declarations would appear as shown below. <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... </XSC:ElementDecl> ... <XSC:AttDef Name="status" Element="Species" ...additionalAttributeInformation.../> Merely naming an attribute may be adequate. Attribute declarations may identify data types and provide information about whether the attribute is required. By default, attributes will be assumed to contain character data (CData), not be required, and have no default value. This information is declared using additional attributes. The simplest attribute declaration possible identifies an attribute as containing character data (CData) and allows the attribute to be optional, as shown below. <XSC:AttDef Name="sampleAttribute"/> Applications may also use the id attribute to provide unique identifiers for attribute declarations using values that are unique within the XSchema. 2.4.2 Attribute Types XSchema 1.0 provides equivalents for all of the XML 1.0 DTD attribute types. All of them are declared using attribute values within the XSC:AttDef element. The CData attribute type is one of the most common, permitting an attribute to contain character data as defined by the XML 1.0 specification. If the Species element were to contain an attribute providing the Latin name of the species, the declaration could look like the following. (The Type attribute could actually be omitted in this case, as CData is the default type.) <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef name="Latin" Type="CData"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> This attribute would then be available for use in instances of the Species element: <Species Latin="Passerina cyanea">...additionalContent...</Species> The ID attribute type is used to uniquely identify elements in a document for application processing. IDRef and IDRefs attribute types are used to refer to a single ID value in the same document or multiple ID values in the same document, separated by whitespace, respectively. These attribute declarations should be used with the same constraints as apply to ID, IDREF, and IDREFS attribute types in XML 1.0. The Entity and Entities attribute types identify the names of unparsed entities. The use of these attribute types should be made with the same constraints as apply to the ENTITY and ENTITIES attribute types in XML 1.0. If a document is checked directly against an XSchema without a conversion to a DTD, information regarding unparsed entities must be available from the parser for these attribute types to be meaningful. The Nmtoken and Nmtokens attribute types are used to declare attributes that must contain information conforming to the Nmtoken and Nmtokens productions in XML 1.0. The Notation and Enumerated attribute types are more complex, requiring an Enumeration attribute to identify their possible content. These two declarations use similar syntax, but the allowed values of Notation declarations must match the Notations declared elsewhere in the XSchema document. If the status attribute of the Species element were to allow the values of extinct, endangered, protected, and non-threatened, an appropriate enumerated type declaration would look like: <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef Name="status" Type="Enumerated" Enumeration="extinct endangered protected non-threatened"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> A Species element created conforming to this declaration might look like: <Species status="extinct">...additionalContentAboutDodos...</Species> 2.4.3 Attribute Defaults XSchema requires attribute declarations to provide information about the default value of a given attribute. XSchema provides for the four cases supported by XML 1.0: #REQUIRED, #IMPLIED, #FIXED AttValue, and AttValue, though they are expressed as choices between required and not required and fixed or not fixed, with an optional default value. There may be only one default value declaration per attribute. Required attributes (identified in XML 1.0 by #REQUIRED) are identified by assigning the value "Yes" to the Required attribute of an XSC:AttDef element. For instance, if the Latin attribute described above was required by the Species element, the XSC:AttDef element would contain a Required attribute: <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef name="Latin" Required="Yes"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> Optional attributes (identified in XML 1.0 by #IMPLIED) are identified assigning the value "No" to the Required attribute of an XSC:AttDef element and not assigning a value to the AttValue attribute. Implied indicates that there is no default value provided, and also that no value is required. If the Latin attribute is optional, the XSC:AttDef element would contain an XSC:Implied element: (Note that this is the default status and the Required declaration does not need to be made explicitly.) <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef name="Latin" Required="No"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> Fixed attributes (identified in XML 1.0 by #FIXED AttValue) are identified through the use of the Fixed attribute and the AttValue attribute, which contains the fixed value for the attribute. Attributes declared using fixed value cannot declare a different value for that attribute. Fixed effectively hard codes attribute values into particular elements. If the Species element had a planet attribute, a Fixed attribute given the value of "Yes" would identify the fixed nature of the attribute and the AttValue attribute would provide the value. <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef Name="planet" Fixed="Yes" AttValue="Earth"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> Attributes may also be provided with a default value that may be overridden by other declarations. These default values are identified through the use of the AttValue attribute. The status attribute of species elements described above would be an appropriate target for such a default value, especially if most species being described fell into a particular category: <XSC:ElementDecl Name="Species"> ...additionalElementInformation... <XSC:AttDef Name="status" Type="Enumerated" Enumeration="extinct endangered protected non-threatened" AttValue="non-threatened"/> </XSC:ElementDecl> Any type of default (required, fixed, etc.) may be used with any attribute type, though default values should always correspond to acceptable values for the attribute type. This notation also permits the declaration of certain attributes (IDs with defaults, for instance) that are prohibited by the standard XML 1.0 DTD syntax. Developers who use these combinations should be certain that their documents will work in DTD-only environments as well as XSchema environments. An XSchema processor that produced normalized-for-DTD use documents could expand these default values and include them in document instances for use with DTD-only environments. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|