Structuring Content with XML

XML as the most successful data representation format makes it easy to start working with structured data because of the simplicity of XML documents and DTDs, and because of the general availability of tools. This paper first describes the origin and features of XML as a markup language. In a second part, the question of how to use the features provided by XML for structuring content is addressed. Data modeling for electronic publishing and document engineering is an research field with many open issues, the most important open question being what to use as the modeling language for XML-based applications. While the paper does not provide a solution to the modeling language question, it provides guidelines for how to design schemas once the model has been defined.