>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

< NAME >Fred< /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:

< NAME dt:char 10 >Fred< /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

One way would be to receive it with that information defined dynamically:

< FIELD >
< NAME >Name< /NAME >
< DATATYPE >Character< /DATATYPE >
< SIZE >10< /SIZE >
< VALUE >Fred< /VALUE >
< /FIELD >