"BartC" <b...@freeuk.com> writes: >> Roy Smith, 28.12.2010 00:21: >>> To go back to my earlier example of >>> >>> <Parental-Advisory>FALSE</Parental-Advisory> >>> > > Isn't it possible for XML to define a shorter alias for these tags? Isn't > there a shortcut available for </Parental-Advisory> in simple examples like > this (I seem to remember something like this)?
Yes, you can define your own entities in a DTD: <!ENTITY paf "<Parental-Advisory>FALSE</Parental-Advisory>"> <!ENTITY pat "<Parental-Advisory>TRUE</Parental-Advisory>"> Later, in your document: &paf; &pat; Although, this is a bit of a contrived example - if space is such a major concern, one wouldn't be so wasteful of it to begin with, but might instead use a short tag form whose value attribute defaults to "FALSE". <!ELEMENT advisory EMPTY> <!ATTLIST advisory value (TRUE | FALSE) "FALSE"> Later, in your document: <movie title="Bambi"><advisory/></movie> <movie title="Scarface"><advisory value="TRUE"/></movie> To save even more space, one could instead define a "pa" attribute as part of the "movie" element, with a default value that would then take no space at all: <!ATTLIST movie pa (TRUE | FALSE) "FALSE"> Later, in your document: <movie name="Bambi"/> <movie name="Scarface" pa="TRUE"/> When you see someone doing stupid things with a tool, it's usually not the tool's fault. Far more often, it's someone using the wrong tool for the task at hand, or using the right tool the wrong way. > And why not use 1 and 0 for TRUE and FALSE? Sounds reasonable in general, although a parental advisory would more often be a range of possible values (G, PG, R, MA, etc.) rather than a boolean. sherm-- -- Sherm Pendley <http://camelbones.sourceforge.net> Cocoa Developer -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list