The Skinny on Schemas - what are they for? why were they developed? can we look at them?

Hi Tom,

I am copy-pasting from WikiPedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_schema

An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constraints are generally expressed using some combination of grammatical rules governing the order of elements, Boolean predicates that the content must satisfy, data types governing the content of elements and attributes, and more specialized rules such as uniqueness and referential integrity constraints.

You can say they are the guidelines/rules to which a particular XML document has to confirm(if it is a valid one).

You can access the schema by opening it in a browser
Try: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd

Regards,
Chinmay.

What does HTML5 use?

HTML being a very different language than XML there is no schema for it.

That being said, browsers from the beginning of time are not strictly (with HTML5's !DOCTYPE you can force the browsers to be standard compliant though) standards compliant. I think one of the biggest offender was Microsoft and its implementation of many IE-only features (For example, CSS Gradient support). And HTML5 is not validated via schema per say, there are specs to which your markup has to be compliant.

You can get a list of HTML specs at: https://www.w3.org/WebPlatform/WG/PubStatus#HTML_specifications