XML: DTD Design

Course description

Overview: Students will learn how to design and write XML DTDs.

Prerequisites: XML: An Introduction or equivalent knowledge.

Performance-based objectives

Lesson objectives help students become comfortable with the course, and also provide a means to evaluate learning. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

*     Explain the difference between well-formed and valid XML.

*     Use Microsoft’s XML parser to validate an XML document.

*     Model a document’s structure.

*     Write a DTD that expresses a document’s structure.

*     Explain the difference between DTDs and XML schema.XML: DTD Design

Course content

Lesson 1: Introduction to Valid XML

Minimal Structural Requirements for XML

Valid XML

Lesson 2: Document Modeling

Planning Stage

How To Model Information

Lesson 3: Writing a DTD

Internal and External DTDs

DTD Syntax

Miscellaneous DTD Concerns

Lesson 4: The Future of DTDs

Overview of Schema

Additional information: This is a half a day of training. It is meant to introduce students to basic XML DTD design. Students wishing further explore document modeling and description in XML should take the Element K course, XML: Schema Design.

The course uses the Microsoft XML parser and the Tools for Validating XML and Viewing XSLT Output. Both of these Internet Explorer add-ons can be found on Microsoft’s Developers Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/. This parser and tool set was chosen because it is easy to setup. Students and training centers do not need to mess around with Java in order to validate XML against a DTD.