XSchema: PCDATA-only content (was: John replies to Ron: ...)

Toby Speight (tms@ansa.co.uk)
05 Jun 1998 10:09:45 +0100


Ron> Ron Bourret <URL:mailto:rbourret@dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>

=> In article <199806041610.SAA11550@berlin.dvs1.tu-darmstadt.de>, Ron
=> wrote:

Ron> Content models of PCDATA and EMPTY represent the terminals in
Ron> DTDs. That is, bold, italic, etc. have a PCDATA content model.
Ron> Furthermore, in more data (as opposed to document) applications
Ron> of XML, PCDATA-only content seems to be relatively common. For
Ron> the moment, I have left PCData in and required Mixed to take at
Ron> least one ElementRef, per your earlier suggestion.

To me, it's not particularly important whether PCDATA-only content is
represented with a distinct element or as a special case of MIXED.
But I think the latter is quite usable if a convenience is defined
thus:

<!ENTITY pcdata "&#60;MIXED/&#62;">

Then we can write

<ELEMENT foo>
&pcdata;
</ELEMENT>

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