JCAPS Interview Question:

Explain Difference between DTD and XSD?

Submitted by: Administrator

Both DTD (Document Type Definition) and XSD (Xml Schema Definition) intends to do the same thing: define the structure of an XML document.

DTD was introduced in 1999 along with the XML specification. It addresses the following:
1. Define elements, attributes and entities
2. The content model (what is between open tag and closing tag) for each element.
3. The possible attributes for an element
4. The content data type for elements and attributes
5. Entities that can be referenced by an XML
and so on.

As XML became more and more popular, in 2001 W3C standardized XSD to define the structure of an XML with more features:
1. XSD is follows XML syntax
2. Introduced over 40 datatypes
3. constraints on the data (of elements/ attributes)
4. precise no.of occurences of elements
and so on.

The biggest advantage of using an XSD over DTD is that you can specify all your validation rules in an XSD and the parser can check the same for you before the actual application that needs the data gets it.
Submitted by: Administrator