Summary

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Schemas enable you to associate data types with attributes, create your own data types, and define the structure of your document using well-formed XML. Schemas are used to define elements that are associated with a name and a type. The type is either a data type or one or more attributes or elements. Elements can be grouped together in group elements, and attributes can be grouped together in attributeGroup elements. The group and attributeGroup elements can either be used locally or they can have document level scope.

Schemas provide many advantages over DTDs; namely, they use namespaces, they utilize a wide range of data types, and they are written in XML. It's likely that schemas will gradually replace DTDs over the next few years. Schemas will be discussed in more detail when we look at BizTalk in Chapter 8 and the Document Object Model in Chapter 11.