HTML child elements - how to define

[A Amitkashaw]

Hello,

As a new guy to XML I'm stuck on (what I perceive as) a trickey problem. I'm defining the element as so:

<!ELEMENT brains (#PCDATA)>

Within this element I have to be able to use HTML tags. XML being XML I can either define every single HTML tag as a child or try and find a quick way of doing it. I'd rather not have to define every single HTML tag that I would like to use. From what I've defined I can have only text within the tags BRAINS. I know there's a CDATA tag and <code> tags that can be used, but can I use these within the ELEMENT tag to define *all* following HTML tags?

Thanks for your time.

- S

 

[Patrick TJ McPhee]

% As a new guy to XML I'm stuck on (what I perceive as) a trickey problem. I'm % defining the element as so:
%
% <!ELEMENT brains (#PCDATA)>
%
% Within this element I have to be able to use HTML tags.

If you want to validate against your DTD, you need to define all the tags you're going to use. You can do this by including the XHTML DTD, something like this:

<!ENTITY % xhtml PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> %xhtml;

You can then define the content depending on what bits of xhtml you need to use. For instance

<!ELEMENT brains (html)>

would allow (and require!) brains to include an entire html document.

<!ELEMENT brains (#PCDATA|html|%Block*>

would allow arbitrary text, an entire html document, or the content model of the HTML body element.