CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlxsd
soren.qvist
soren.qvist

Reputation: 7416

Allowing certain XHTML tags in an XML Schema?

I'm designing an XML Schema for my website. One of the elements in the schema is called "comments", which is supposed to contain comments posted from users. I wan't to allow certain xhtml tags to be used: b, i, and u for styling. So far what I've done is to import the XHTML namespace, and then declare a complexType for my comments element:

<import namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
        schemaLocation="xhtml1-transitional.xsd" />

....

<element name="comments">
    <complexType mixed="true">
        <any minOccurs="0">
            <element ref="xhtml:u"/>
            <element ref="xhtml:b"/>
            <element ref="xhtml:i"/>
        </any>
    </complexType>
</element>

But this doesn't seem to work! At least the XML Schema won't validate via the IBM XML Schema Quality Checker. The xhtml1-transitional.xsd file is in the same folder as the XML Schema.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 683

Answers (2)

Petru Gardea
Petru Gardea

Reputation: 21658

You have a syntax error; <any/> can't have content. You may have to use instead (most likely) a repeating choice.

Upvotes: 1

apfelbox
apfelbox

Reputation: 2634

The easiest way would be to use a <[CDATA[ ... ]]> section for the comments. I think you validate the tags in your application code, so you don't have to enforce the validation in the XSD again.

Edit:

Since you want an XSD solution only, I think the simplest way would be to define the comments tag as a string and escape the html special chars:

<xsd:element name="comments" type="xsd:string" />

I don't think, that it would be a good way to go to include the actual tags as XML in the schema, since it is just arbitrary content (what's with valid HTML, which is invalid XML? For example <p> without </p> is valid HTML, but invalid in XML).

The XML special characters to escape

" & ' < >

Upvotes: 1

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