Document Structure Description

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Document Structure Description, or DSD, is a schema language for XML, that is, a language for describing valid XML documents. It's an alternative to DTD or the W3C XML Schema.

An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constraints are generally expressed using some combination of grammatical rules governing the order of elements, Boolean predicates that the content must satisfy, data types governing the content of elements and attributes, and more specialized rules such as uniqueness and referential integrity constraints.

An example of DSD in its simplest form:

<dsd xmlns=" http://www.brics.dk/DSD/2.0 [ permanent dead link ]"  xmlns:my=" http://example.com "><if><element name="my:foo"/><declare><attribute name="first"/><attribute name="second"/><contents><element name="my:bar"/></contents></declare></if><if><element name="my:bar"/><declare><contents></contents></declare></if></dsd>

This says that element named "foo" in the XML namespace " http://example.com " may have two attributes, named "first" and "second". A "foo" element may not have any character data. It must contain one subelement, named "bar", also in the " http://example.com " namespace. A "bar" element is not allowed any attributes, character data or subelements.

XML namespaces are used for providing uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML document. They are defined in a W3C recommendation. An XML instance may contain element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary. If each vocabulary is given a namespace, the ambiguity between identically named elements or attributes can be resolved.

One XML document that would be valid according to the above DSD would be:

<foo xmlns=" http://example.com " second="2"><bar/></foo>

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