| As developers know, the beauty of XML is that it is extensible, even to the point that you can invent new elements and attributes as you write XML documents. Then, however, you need to define your changes so that applications will be able to make sense of them and this is where XML schema languages come into play. RELAX NG (pronounced relaxing), the Regular Language Description for XML Core - New Generation is quickly gaining momentum as an alternative to other schema languages. Designed to solve a variety of common problems raised in the creation and sharing of XML vocabularies, RELAX NG is less complex than The W3C's XML Schema Recommendation and more powerful and flexible than DTDs. RELAX NG is a grammar-based schema language that's both easy to learn for schema creators and easy to implement for software developers.
In this book developers are introduced to this language and will learn a method for creating XML schemas. The book offers an explanation of RELAX NG that enables intermediate and advanced XML developers to focus on XML document structures and content rather than battle the intricacies of yet another convoluted standard. RELAX NG covers: Introduction to RELAX NG; Building RELAX NG schemas using XML syntax; Building RELAX NG schemas using compact syntax, an alternative non-XML syntax; Flattening schemas to limit depth and provide reusability; Using external datatype libraries with RELAX NG; W3C XML Schema regular expressions; Writing extensible schemas; Annotating schemas; Generating schemas from different sources; Determinism and datatype assignment & more. | |
