I have taught half-day and whole-day courses in XML on many occasions. One of the big problems with the full-day course is that after you've done some history and introduction and goal-setting, then talked about elements, you get to this point (attribute declarations) around lunch time.
The consequence of this is that when the class comes back after lunch, to listen the discussion of attribute types and their declarations, most of them go to sleep. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of attribute types (I voted against a few of them), there are lots of relevant details, and it is pretty tedious. Bear in mind also that since all this stuff lives in the DTD, it is really of interest only in the context of validation, and if you're working with downstream non-validating applications, you can pretty well ignore all this attribute type stuff.
Copyright © 1998, Tim Bray. All rights reserved.