We present DSD (Document Structure Description), which is a schema language for XML documents. A DSD is itself an XML document, which describes a family of XML application documents.
The expressiveness of DSD goes far beyond the simple DTD concept, covering advanced features such as conditional constraints, multiple nonterminals for each element, gradual declaration of attributes, support for both ordered and unordered contents, and constraints on reference targets. We also support a declarative mechanism for inserting default elements and attributes that is reminiscent of cascading style sheets. Finally, we include a simple technique for evolving DSD documents through selective redefinitions.
DSD is completely self-describable, meaning that the syntax of legal DSD documents together with all static requirements are captured in a special DSD document, the meta-DSD of less than 500 lines.
We relate DSD to other recent XML schema languages. In particular, we provide a critique of and comparison with the proposal from the W3C XML Schema Working Group.
DSD is fully implemented and is available in an open source distribution. This prototype is guaranteed to process any application document in linear time.
A Document Structure Description (DSD) is a specification of a
class of XML documents. A DSD defines a grammar for XML documents,
default element attributes and content, and documentation of the
class. A DSD is itself an XML document. We have five major goals for the
descriptive power of DSDs, namely that they should:
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The reader is assumed familiar with standard XML concepts, such as
those defined in
A well-formed XML document is represented as a tree. The leaf nodes correspond to empty elements, chardata, processing instructions, and comments. The internal nodes correspond to non-empty elements. DTD information is not represented. Each element is labelled with a name and a set of attributes, each consisting of a name and a value. Names, values, and chardata are strings.
Child nodes are ordered. The
Processing instructions with target dsd or include as well as elements and attributes with namespace http://www.brics.dk/DSD contain information relevant to the DSD processing. All other processing instructions and also chardata consisting of white-space only and comments are ignored.
A DSD defines the syntax of a family of conforming XML
documents. An
A DSD is itself an XML document. This section describes the main
aspects of the DSD notation and its meaning. For a complete
definition, we refer to
A DSD is associated to an application document by placing a special
processing instruction in the document prolog. This processing
instruction has the form
If no constraints have been violated upon termination, then the original document conforms to the DSD and the resulting document with defaults inserted is output.
A DSD consists of a number of definitions, each associated with an ID
allowing reference for reuse and redefinition. In the following, the
various kinds of definitions are described. We use a number of small
examples, some inspired by the XHTML language
The central kind of definition is the
The IDs of element definitions are reminiscent of nonterminals in context-free grammars. Each ID determines the requirements imposed on the contents, attributes, and context of the element to which it is assigned. We allow several different element definitions with the same name; thus, element names are not used as nonterminals. This distinction allows several versions of an element to coexist.
As an example, consider a DSD describing a simple database
containing information about books, such as, their titles, authors,
ISBN numbers, and so on. Imagine that both the whole database and each
book entry should contain a title tag, but with different
structure. Book entry titles may only contain chardata without
markup, but may optionally contain a style attribute; also,
defaults may be specified for book titles. Database titles may contain
arbitrary contents and no attributes. These two kinds of
title elements can be defined as follows:
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During evaluation of a constraint, attributes are declared gradually. Only attributes that have been declared are allowed in an element. Since constraints can be conditional and attributes are declared inside constraints, this allows hierarchical structures of attributes to be defined. For instance, in a input element, the length attribute may only be present if the type attribute is present and has value text or password.
An attribute declaration consists of a name and a string type. The name specifies the name of the attribute, and the string type specifies the set of its allowed values. It is an error if an attribute being declared is not present in the current element, unless it is declared as "optional".
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We now present a small example of a complete DSD. It describes an XML syntax for databases of books. Such a description could be arbitrarily detailed; we have settled for title, ISBN number, authors (with homepages), publisher (with homepage), publication year, and reviews. The main structure of the DSD is as follows: