Re: DTD Notation

[Alireza Kheyrollahi <aliostad@kavosh.net>]

Title: DTD Notation

Dear Jim,

 

Why take the pain to work on an obselete technology. It was not more than a year that DTD had come and everybody was waiting for XML Schema. And this story belongs to year 1999 !

 

But for the question, those two lines are not different. Parantheses are for grouping child elements into groups. The second line (  <!ELEMENT Test2 (ItemA, ItemB?, (ItemC)*)>   ) has no groups!

 

Yours

Alireza Kheyrollahi

System Advance, UK

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Boyse, Jim

To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org

Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 5:32 PM

Subject: DTD Notation

Can someone help with a DTD notation question, please?

I'm looking at a DTD furnished by an outside source.  In the DTD, most "optional repeating" elements are defined with an asterisk, for example, <!ELEMENT Test1 (ItemA, ItemB?, ItemC*)>.  But a few are defined with additional parentheses, for example, <!ELEMENT Test2 (ItemA, ItemB?, (ItemC)*)>.

What's the difference between "ItemC*" and "(ItemC)*"?

Thanks for any insight into this (subtlety | confusion) you can give.

--Jim
 James A. Boyse
Foremost Insurance Group                        E-Mail: boyse@foremost.com
P.O. Box 2450                                            Phone: 616/956-4150
Grand Rapids, MI  49501-2450                  Fax:      616/956-4450