XML and DTDs

I am using DTD's to validate my XML document using PHP with Expat. Well, the issue is that I am trying have an element with data that could be parsable, but I want the DTDs to tell Expat to not parse it and ignore it with out using entities.

For example:
<section>Hey people, check this code out <pre>var i = 0;</pre></section>

So it will ignore that it is there and just send to the PHP script as is. Any ideas on how it could be done with the DTDs? Thanks.

It can't be done with DTD; maybe with XSD, but I don't know about that.

Anyway I thought that's what CDATA sections are for:


<section>
Hey people, check this code out
<![CDATA[
<pre>var i=0;</pre>
]]>
</section>

i thought CDATA was going to replace the comment tag.

it amounts to the same thing - anything inside a CDATA section is ignored by the parser, even non-entity < and > symbols. But hmmm ... not sure if that means it can be dumped as output text in transformations, or whether it's just a comment that can't be transformed. You'd have to try it and see.

But either way, DTD won't help you here - DTD cannot control what kind of data is allowed inside an element, only whether it's CDATA, PCDATA or a combination of those two plus other elements. XSD, I think, can do this - but I know almost nothing about XSD.

And in any case ... this whole thing about putting entity-HTML inside XML is strange; I see it a lot, particularly in weblogs - an XML node with HTML inside it which is supposed to be parsed as literal HTML inside the transformed node. But my opinion is that this is sloppy XML; you should not add visual markup or attempt to imply formatting within data XML.

What you can do, to get a proper solution to this, is make the <pre/> node a real XML node - cite it in your DTD and then parse it into an HTML <pre/> element in when you're generating your page.