GlossaryΒΆ

TAL
The Template Attribute Language is an attribute language used to create dynamic templates. It allows elements of a document to be replaced, repeated, or omitted.
METAL
The Macro Expansion Template Attribute Language is an attribute language for structured macro preprocessing. It can be used in conjunction with or independently of TAL, TALES and ZPT.
SAX
The Simple API for XML is an interface for the sequential processing of XML documents, in constrast with DOM. Python implements this specification in the xml.sax package and subpackages.
environment
The namespace in which a courtain template is evaluated; it is represented as a python dictionary between names and arbitrary objects.
macro
A macro is a template with some subtrees marked as slot. When the macro is used, these slots can be replaced with other content.
slot
A slot is a “hole” in a macro, which can be replaced with different content by whoever calls the macro.
translation domain
The translation domain is a string which tells the kind of translations to find for words, so to avoid ambiguities and separate the message catalogs for different applications or different parts of the same application. E.g., a tipical example of the ambiguity would be the word “Sun”, which can mean the star if we are in the “astronomical” translation domain, the company if we are in the “commercial” one, or the day if we are in the “calendar” one. On the other hand, if different applications use different translation domains, there will be no risk of clash between names and translations used, keeping the development separated.
simple attribute
One of the way of parsing an attribute; in this case the value of the attribute is the argument of the processing instruction.
single attribute
One of the way of parsing an attribute; in this case the value of the attribute is split at the first space found; the two pieces are called “first part” and “second part” of the attribute.
list attribute
One of the way of parsing an attribute; in this case the value of the attribute is split at every semicolon, then all the pieces are parsed as if they were single attributes. The various elements of the resulting list are the “pieces” of the attribute, each one composed of a “first part” and a “second part”.

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