XML Schema Info
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which approved XML Schema as an official recommendation in 2001, "XML Schemas express shared vocabularies and allow machines to carry out rules made by people. They provide a means for defining the structure, content, and semantics of XML documents."
XML Schema was born out of a need to provide a more powerful and flexible alternative to the standard DTD (Document Type Definition), a language for expressing SGML and XML content models. Though many DTDs are still in use today in legacy document frameworks and industry standards, and are even often used in tandem with XSDs, XML Schema offers a lengthy list of advantages for defining XML documents.
The pages on this site provide a large amount of resources, including links to W3C specifications, an industry standards schema library, XML Schema applications and uses, and descriptions of some powerful tools for working with XML Schema.
The diagram below is a graphical representation of an XML Schema shown in Altova XMLSpy's XML Schema editor, which supports multiple viewing and editing options.
