As Christoper described, a DTD defines the legal boundaries of an XML
file - that means it defines what XML elements can be used and in what
context, how the text content of the element should be handled, what
attributes an element supports & their own boundies as well as defining
what XML entities can be used.
If you are editing XML as a noob, I'd recommend jEdit with the XML
plugin.
See here for an example DTD:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#a_dtd_XHTML-1.0-Strict
On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 00:14 +0000, Graeme Kidd wrote:
> Hi
> Its my first time posting here so I hope I am in the correct mailing
> list.
>
> I am using a XML program that has two views; one user friendly wysiwyg
> view and a plain text view of the underlining XML. When editing XML
> files in the wysiwyg view the backend XML gets really messy as no
> formatting is applied which causes lines to become long
> and unreadable.
>
> I have been told that pretty printing can be configured on a DTD basis
> but I am not sure what that means and a quick search brings up things
> about XSLT.
>
> Does anyone know how certain formatting can be forced onto an XML file
> via a DTD file?
>
> Thanks for your time,
> Graeme
David / http://semlabs.co.uk/
