RE: Repeating attribute specifications

Paul Grosso (paul@arbortext.com)
Thu, 12 Jun 1997 17:48:55 -0400


At 18:53 1997 06 12 GMT, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>I assumed that the multiple attributes was so that if (say)
>
><!ATTLIST FOO BAR CDATA "BAZ">
>
>occurs in the external DTD and
>
><!ATTLIST FOO BAR CDATA "XYZZY">
>
>occurs in the internal subset
>then this is now legal whereas it wasn't before. But what is now the default
>value of BAR? I assumed it was the later declaration ("XYZZY"). Please
>disabuse me if this is wrong.

Your answer seems to be in 3.3 of the XML-lang spec:

When more than one AttlistDecl is provided for a given element type, the
contents of all those provided are merged. When more than one definition is
provided for the same attribute of a given element type, the first
declaration is binding and later declarations are ignored. For
interoperability, writers of DTDs may choose to provide at most one
attribute-list declaration for a given element type, and at most one
attribute definition for a given attribute name. An XML processor may, at
user option, issue a warning when more than one attribute-list declar ation
is provided for a given element type, or more than one attribute definition
for a given attribute, but this is not an error.