In the DTD file, an element declaration defines an XML element. An element declaration has the following syntax:

The DTD description defines the XML tag <product>. The description (#PCDATA) specifies parsed character data. Parsed data is the text between the start tag and the end tag of an XML element. Parsed character data is text without child elements.

The following example shows a DTD description of an element with two child elements:

Brand and type are child elements of boat. Each child element can contain characters. In this example, brand and type can occur once inside the element boat. The following DTD description specifies that brand must occur one or more times for a boat: