Glossary
- 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”.