Get powerful results with XML Schema—fast!
The XML Schema Companion brings you up to speed on XML Schema with clarity, thoroughness, and precision. Itis the perfect introduction and reference for every content specialist, architect, and developer...including anyone working with the new schema support in Microsoft Office 2003.
As in his best-selling The XML Companion and The XSL Companion, Neil Bradley carefully organizes this book to fully illuminate the most crucial concepts first. You'll begin by mastering the construction of document models. Next, you'll learn how to define data types that can serve as reusable building blocks for your documents. Then you'll be ready to master the powerful XML Schema pattern language and inheritance techniques. The XML Schema Companion:
Preface.
1. Using This Book.
Assumptions. Book Structure. Style Conventions.
Document Models.
2. Essential Concepts.
Well-Formed Documents. Document Classes and Instances. Document Class Rules. Narrative Documents and Data Documents. Example Document Classes. Document Type Definitions. Alternative Modeling Languages. XML Schemas. Data Types.
3. Schema Definitions.
Schema Documents. Annotations. Element and Attribute Declarations. Data Type Definitions. Common Attributes.
4. Validating Document Instances.
Validation Techniques. Namespace Complications. Document Instance Namespace Issues. Schema for Schemas.
5. Simple Elements and Attributes.
Element Declarations. Attribute Declarations.
6. Defining Document Structures.
Document Structures. Child Element References. Complex Type Elements. Sequence of Elements. Optional and Repeating Elements. Choice of Elements. Complex Models. All Elements Required in Any Sequence. The any Element. Shared Groups.
7. Text and Simple Data Types.
Text. Text and Attributes. Mixed Content. Any Element Mixed with Text. Simple Data Types. Special Data Type Features. Nil Values.
8. Ambiguities.
Unequivocal Determination. Serious Ambiguities. Common Solutions. Any Element Ambiguities. Theoretically Trivial Ambiguities.
9. Local Elements.
Global Element Limitations. Local Element Declarations. Context Element Requirement. Sharing Local Elements. Namespace Complications. SGML Exclusions and Inclusions.
10. Global and Shared Attributes.
Global Declarations. Namespace Complications. Attribute Groups.
11. Unique and Referenced Elements.
Unique Fragments and References. Simple DTD-Based Identifiers. Advanced Requirements. Unique Fragment Identification. Fragment Selectors. Scope of Uniqueness. Identifier Fields. Key References. Complete Book Example.
12. Namespace Switching.
Namespace and Schema Relationship. Element Importing. Attribute Importing. Any Element from Other Namespace. Validation Options. Any Attribute from Other Namespace.
13. Including External Components.
Definitions and Documents. Including a Schema Document. Redefining a Schema Document. Importing a Schema Document.
Creating Data Types.
14. Creation of New Simple Types.
Simple Type Definitions. Derivations. Restrictions. Facet Elements. Enumeration Facet. Whitespace and Pattern Facets. Length and Numeric Facets. Derivation of Derivation Limitations. Lists. Unions. Combinations of Unions and Lists. Example Built-in Extended Data Types. String Normalization and Tokens. Type Library.
15. Patterns.
Introduction. Simple Templates. Atoms. Quantifiers and Quantities. Escape Characters. Character Classes. Character Class Ranges. Subexpressions. Character Class Escapes.
16. Shared and Derived Complex Types.
Introduction. Named Complex Types. Additions to the Target Namespace. Derivation from Complex Types. Derivation by Extension. Derivation by Restriction. Simple Content.
17. Advanced Inheritance Techniques.
Inheritance Concepts. Summary of Schema Inheritance Features. Final Types. Fixed Facets. Abstract Data Types. Substitution Data Type Selection. Blocking Derivation Usage. Substitution Elements. Comparison of Java and XML Inheritance Terminology.
Reference.
18. Document Modeling Techniques.
Industry-Standard Models. Analysis Techniques. Backward Compatibility with a DTD. Element or Attribute Decision. Element Structures. Devising Element and Attribute Names. Comments. Lists. Tables. Representing Special Characters. Schema Document Construction.
19. DTD Models.
Background. Declarations. Element Declarations. Attribute Declarations. Entities for Sharing Definitions. Notations. Suppressed DTD Fragments. Namespace Handling.
20. DTD for Schema Definitions.
Background. Element Hierarchies. Attributes. Complete DTD.
21. Namespaces.
Before Namespaces. The Need for Namespaces. The Namespaces Standard. Namespace Partitions. Namespace Identification. Absence of Namespaces. Namespace Declarations. Default Namespace. Attributes. Combined Qualified and Unqualified Elements. XML Namespace.
22. Next Steps.
Introduction. General XML Sites. Relevant Software. Further Reading. Existing Document Models. Mailing Lists. About the Author.
Index.
The XML Schema Standard is a powerful eXtensible Markup Language (XML) document modeling technology that was released in 2001 by the World Wide Web Consortium and aims to replace the Document Type Definition (DTD) feature of the core XML standard. The XML Schema standard performs the same role and is fully backward compatible in terms of the modeling tools at its disposal, but also includes many additional features.
The XML Schema Companion serves the programmer, analyst, or consultant involved in the modeling of XML documents. It provides a concise, compact yet thorough examination of every feature of the XML Schema standard. It also covers document modeling techniques in general, to assist those who need to amend or create new document models.
This book assumes knowledge of the XML standard in general but does not assume an understanding of the DTD language or any other document modeling language. In addition, it does not require any prior knowledge of namespaces and XPath expressions (they are both exploited to support features of the XML Schema language).
The XML Schema Standard is a powerful eXtensible Markup Language (XML) document modeling technology that was released in 2001 by the World Wide Web Consortium and aims to replace the Document Type Definition (DTD) feature of the core XML standard. The XML Schema standard performs the same role and is fully backward compatible in terms of the modeling tools at its disposal, but also includes many additional features.
The XML Schema Companion serves the programmer, analyst, or consultant involved in the modeling of XML documents. It provides a concise, compact yet thorough examination of every feature of the XML Schema standard. It also covers document modeling techniques in general, to assist those who need to amend or create new document models.
This book assumes knowledge of the XML standard in general but does not assume an understanding of the DTD language or any other document modeling language. In addition, it does not require any prior knowledge of namespaces and XPath expressions (they are both exploited to support features of the XML Schema language).
Anonymous
Posted Sun Aug 15 00:00:00 EDT 2004
Neil Bradley in his fourth book tells you everything you would ever want to know about XML Schemas or better knows as XSD for XML Schema Definition. With the popularity that various XML technologies are attracting these days, every developer, architect and designer needs to know what XML Schema is and how it used. This topic is covered in many other books, but Bradley¿s book has by far the most extensive, comprehensive and thorough coverage of the topic. It shows that author truly understand the topic at hand, and can convey the message clearly to the reader. The organization of the book starts with the author explaining how the XML Schema standard defines a template that documents created based on that template must conform to, followed by showing the reader how to define reusable data blocks based on the XML Schema language, and it finishes with XML Schema related topic such as namespaces and a rather complete overview what¿s out there and where to get more information. Every XML document, standard, protocol ¿ basically anything that has anything to do with XML needs to use or to interact with XML Schema in one or another. XML Schemas are used to model both data and narrative XML documents, which means that if you are ever planning on interacting with XML, you better understand XML schemas. I thought that this topic will be very easy, and there is nothing to it¿ I was wrong. There is a whole lot to cover and once you read Bradley¿s book you¿ll know what I am talking about. The standard for schemas is so extensive, that the first few chapters of his book are spent on what the different terminologies mean and how they interrelate. For example, the difference between narrative data (data where the sequence of events and representation matters greatly) and datacenteric documents (order of presenting the data does not matter), and the difference between the schema definition author (the person who creates the schemas) versus the document instance author (people who create well-formed documents) and many others alike. After talking about the basics, the author spends a great deal of time explaining the various components of the XML schema such as elements, attributes, simple data type, complex data types, etc¿ Some of the advanced topics covered include inheritance and pattern recognition. Both topics are very well explained and covered well. If you know regular expression from Perl, then pattern recognition in schema world would look very familiar to you. Some of the advanced topics covered include inheritance and pattern recognition. Both topics are very well explained and covered well. If you know regular expression from Perl, then pattern recognition in schema world would look very familiar to you. In closing, if you think you know XML Schema¿s, think again. This book covers the topic in detail and does so very well. I would recommend this book to be read by any schema designer or a valuable reference for anyone interface with any XML technology.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Wed Dec 10 00:00:00 EST 2003
You probably know that XML is descended from SGML, and it thus inherited DTDs, which were then the only means of specifying a document model. That proved adequate for SGML, but its limitations soon became clear in XML. Several alternatives were proposed, but XML Schema seems to be winning. Thus Bradley has delivered a timely exposition. He covers all the features clearly. A brief mention is made of its competitors, Relax NG and Schematron. But they do seem to be fading fast. The most interesting part of Bradley's text are the chapters on namespaces. Other aspects of Schema are lower level and, while useful, are frankly mundane. By contrast, namespaces are the critical feature of Schema. They let you build on pre-existing schemas that have been published on the web. And you can publish your schemas so that others might benefit. You and those in your field or industry can cooperatively derive a net gain by agreeing and publishing standard definitions. A Network effect. I assume that you are familiar with HTML. In that, the crucial element are the hyperlinks (the href and src attributes in certain tags). It is these that put the 'H' in HTML. Without them, HTML just becomes a limited page markup language. It is that ability to link to arbitrary locations on the Internet which produced the Web. Likewise, in the much heralded Web Services, these exchange data via XML. Which in turn depends on XML Schema to build consistent hyperlinked semantics. You should read Bradley's chapters on namespaces thoroughly.
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Overview
Get powerful results with XML Schema—fast!
The XML Schema Companion brings you up to speed on XML Schema with clarity, thoroughness, and precision. Itis the perfect introduction and reference for every content specialist, architect, and developer...including anyone working with the new schema support in Microsoft Office 2003.
As in his best-selling The XML Companion and The XSL Companion, Neil Bradley carefully organizes this book to fully ...