NOTE: These slides have not been updated since 2003. They have been superseded by the book An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies Addison-Wesley, and the accompanying online material. Please see http://www.brics.dk/ixwt/ for more information. Anders Møller and Michael Schwartzbach, February 2006

THE XML REVOLUTION  -  TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Attribute and element defaults

Each attribute and element declarations can contain a default="..." attribute.

• attribute defaults: are inserted (before validation) if the attribute is absent (in elements of the type containing the declaration)

• element defaults: are inserted as character data in empty elements (of the type of the declaration)

(For some strange design reason, element defaults cannot contain markup.)

Example:

With a schema containing:

<element name="widget" default="no content explicitly provided"> <complexType mixed="true"> <attribute name="size" default="big"/> </complexType> </element>

a schema processor will validate and transform:

<widget/>

into:

<widget size="big">no content explicitly provided</widget>

COPYRIGHT © 2000-2003 ANDERS MØLLER & MICHAEL I. SCHWARTZBACH