Relax NG

Eric van der Vlist is the resident expert on XML schema languages on XML.com. He is also a member of the ISO DSDL committee, where standardization work on RELAX NG and related specifications is in progress. Eric is also the author of O'Reilly's XML Schema.

Foreword by James Clark; Foreword by Murata Makoto; Preface Part I. Tutorial; 1. What RELAX NG Offers; Diversity; Keeping Documents Independent of Applications; Validation Has Many Aspects The Best Way to Validate XML Document Structures; RELAX NG's Diverse Applications; RELAX NG as a Pivot Format; Why Use Other Schema Languages?; 2. Simple Foundations Are Beautiful; Documents and Infosets; Different Types of Schema Languages; A Simple Example A Strong Mathematical Background; Patterns, and Only Patterns 3. First Schema; Getting Started; First Patterns; Complete Schema; 4. Introducing the Compact Syntax; First Compact Patterns; Full Schema; XML or Compact?; 5. Flattening the First Schema; Defining Named Patterns; Referencing Named Patterns The grammar and start Elements; Assembling the Parts; Problems That Never Arise; Recursive Models; Escaping Named Pattern Identifiers in the Compact Syntax; 6. More Complex Patterns The group Pattern; The interleave Pattern; The choice Pattern Pattern Compositions; Order Variation as a Source of Information Text and Empty Patterns, Whitespace, and Mixed Content Why Is It Called interleave?; Mixed Content Models with Order A Restriction Related to interleave; A Missing Pattern: Unordered Group; 7. Constraining Text Values; Fixed Values; Co-Occurrence Constraints; Enumerations; Whitespace and RELAX NG Native Datatypes; Using String Datatypes in Attribute Values; When to Use String Datatypes; Using Different Types in Each Value; Exclusions; Lists; Data Versus Text; 8. Datatype Libraries W3C XML Schema Type Library; DTD Compatibility Datatypes Which Library Should Be Used?; 9. Using Regular Expressions to Specify Simple Datatypes; A Swiss Army Knife; The Simplest Possible Pattern Facets; Quantifying; More Atoms; Common Patterns; 10. Creating Building Blocks; Using External References; Merging Grammars; A Real-World Example: XHTML 2.0 Other Options; 11. Namespaces; A Ten-Minute Guide to XML Namespaces; The Two Challenges of Namespaces; Declaring Namespaces in Schemas; Accepting Foreign Namespaces; Namespaces, Building Blocks, and Chameleon Design; 12. Writing Extensible Schemas; Extensible Schemas; The Case for Open Schemas; Extensible and Open?; 13. Annotating Schemas Common Principles for Annotating RELAX NG Schemas; Documentation Annotation for Applications; 14. Generating RELAX NG Schemas Examplotron: Instance Documents as Schemas; Literate Programming UML; Spreadsheets; 15. Simplification and Restrictions Simplification; Restrictions; 16. Determinism and Datatype Assignment; What Is Ambiguity?; The Downsides of Ambiguous and Nondeterministic Content Models; Some Ideas to Make Disambiguation Easier; Part II. Reference; 17. Element Reference 18. Compact Syntax Reference; 19. Datatype Reference; Part III. Appendixes; A. DSDL; B. The GNU Free Documentation License Glossary; Index