Question

I have a question regarding the XML Schema type.

The type has to be:

text, allowing embedded HTML formatting

what should I use to do this? (allowing embedded HTML formatting? I think for text xsd:string for example would be fine but I don’t know what to do to allow embedded HTML formatting)

What should I include in this case?

Answer 1

The xs:string datatype is really not suitable for character data interspersed with markup; that is what complex types with mixed="true" are for.

If you’re writing an XSD schema for a document type and want a particular element to be able to contain arbitrary XHTML elements, the right way to declare it is something like this:

<xs:element name="embedded_html">
  <xs:complexType mixed="true">
    <xs:sequence>
      <xs:any namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" 
              minOccurs="0" 
              maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
    </xs:sequence>
  </xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

This won’t allow the HTML to consist of tag salad; the HTML will need to be well formed (i.e. be encoded as XHTML). If for whatever reason you believe you need to allow tag salad as the content of embedded_html, then your choices are to reconsider what you actually need or to do as some other vocabularies do and escape the HTML encoding. But even in that case, I think you’ll do better to use mixed content than xs:string.