With customers including Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, John Wiley & Sons, and Oxford University Press, a good portion of the world's published content is already modelled with DTDs and schemas developed by Griffin Brown.

XML Schemas and DTDs

We pride ourselves on being able to combine a technically correct solution with one that makes good business sense, since many factors beyond the structure of content should drive document modelling: the production workflows, the value of the content, and the likely content usage scenarios.

DTD and Schema Assessment

We provide detailed and comprehensive assessments of DTDs and Schemas based on our long experience in the field, while looking forward to upcoming technologies and business developments. We produce reports that will consider (at least):

  • Suitability of DTD for Target Content
  • Conformance of the DTD
  • Technical Quality of the Formal DTD
  • Quality of the Informal Parts of the DTD
  • Use of Standards
  • Versioning and Management
  • Software Compatibility Issues
  • Schema Compatibility Issues

Standard DTD Support

We have experience of working with a number of standard (and de facto standard) DTDs and DTD modules, including:

  • DocBook
  • DITA
  • The NLM DTDs
  • The Oasis Exchange and CALS table models
  • ONIX DTDs and Schemas
  • Medline, CrossRef, Ingenta and Extenza metadata DTDs

We can assess these model's suitability for your use, or customise and/or incorporate them using bespoke models to provide a complete solution.

Managed Documentation

A DTD or Schema is of little use unless accompanied by good documentation. At Griffin Brown we have developed and refined working methods for producing documentation for schemas and DTDs, and managing the documentation's evolution over time as the Schema is developed and maintained.

Users of Griffin Brown DTDs and Schemas enjoy:

  • Fully hyperlinked documentation in HTML, RTF and/or PDF
  • Hyperlinked, normalised content models in content, for 'exploring' the permitted models
  • Validated examples, with pertinent portions highlighted

Many of our clients choose to license our documentation software, allowing them to author and test their own examples, and continuously keep the documentation in perfect sync. with the DTD/Schema as they themselves maintain it.

DTDs, XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, DSDL ... ?

With SGML the choice was simple: you could only model documents with DTDs. Now however, XML has attracted a number of different technologies for defining document models, each with their own particular strengths and weaknesses.

We are able to advise on the right choice of Schema language for a project, taking into account not just technical suitability, but practical issues such as tool support and which working methods to choose as 'best practice'. For many publishing projects DTDs are still a good choice, but the W3C XML Schema Definition Language is enjoying increased tool support and may be suitable for use in data-like models such as those found in many eCommerce applications.

Standards Formation

Griffin Brown works actively at trying to improve the quality of XML Schema languages by sponsoring a member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) committee IST/41, which embodies the UK's input into the forthcoming ISO Standard DSDL (Document Schema Definition Languages).

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