I'm helping a third party design a DLL for our development team. I'm asking for an XML output stream from their DLL. I'll be cramming this into a string VARIABLE (not a file). I need to be able to tell what format an element is supposed to be. In other words, I need to know that

&ltNAME>Fred&lt/NAME>

is a character 10 field.

Isn't there a way to describe the elements' format INSIDE the XML stream? It seems like it is something like this:

&ltNAME dt:char 10>Fred&lt/NAME>

Am I close? It doesn't seem like a separate XSL or DTD file would be a good option for me, as I'm getting a stream of text back from a DLL.

As you can tell, I'm no XML expert. TIA

Marty