NOTATION Example (was Re: Binary Data in XML)

James Tauber (jtauber@jtauber.com)
Thu, 1 Oct 1998 03:29:43 +0800

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>
>I know that this can also be done using NOTATION but also that - like many
>others - I don't know how to do it and have never seen a NOTATION used in
>XML documents.

Here is an example based on one from my XML course. Note that attributes are
just one use of notations, others are unparsed entities and PI targets which
I can also give examples of if anyone would like.

Say you want a different notation for US dates, Australian dates and ISO
dates.

First of all the declaration:

<!NOTATION USDATE SYSTEM "http://www.schema.net/usdate.not">
<!NOTATION AUSDATE SYSTEM "http://www.schema.net/ausdate.not">
<!NOTATION ISODATE SYSTEM "http://www.schema.net/isodate.not">

Then if an element type is to use this notation, we declare a notation
attribute:

<!ATTLIST DATE
FORMAT NOTATION (USDATE|AUSDATE|ISODATE) "ISODATE")

Then we can use:

<DATE>19980414</DATE>
<DATE FORMAT="ISODATE">19980414</DATE>
<DATE FORMAT="AUSDATE">14/4/1998</DATE>
<DATE FORMAT="USDATE">4/14/1998</DATE>

in our documents and the notation identified by the system identifier in the
NOTATION declarations will be associated with the content of the elements
and a parser provides this information for the application.

James

--
James Tauber / jtauber@jtauber.com      http://www.jtauber.com/
Lecturer and Associate Researcher
Electronic Commerce Network             ( http://www.xmlinfo.com/
Curtin Business School                  ( http://www.xmlsoftware.com/
Perth, Western Australia                ( http://www.schema.net/