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

"Thorough and competent guide to a complex topic, written by an obvious expect in the field."Linux Format, September