hello,
I need to learn enough xml to use a piece of software. can anybody
point me to a friendly guide. right now I want to know exactly what a
placeholder is. I kind of understand but not really .

thanks

mick

mick wrote:
> hello,
> I need to learn enough xml to use a piece of software. can anybody
> point me to a friendly guide. right now I want to know exactly what a
> placeholder is. I kind of understand but not really .

The term placeholder isn't specific to XML: it's used in a lot of
computing and non-computing fields.

You haven't told us what the piece of software is that you want to use,
but in most document contexts I have come across, "placeholder" means an
empty element or attribute (or one with a temporary value) which must be
present to satisfy the constraints of the Schema or DTD, but which does
not yet have any real value or content.

For example, in DocBook, a chapter must have a title and at least one
other element present for the document to be valid, so you might want to
create dummy entries for your intended chapters, but with no content, eg

<chapter id="xyz">
<title></title>
<para></para>
</chapter>

(although it would be more likely that you would give the titles: that
would at least enable you to generate the Table of Contents). In this
sense, the para element is a placeholder, so is the ID value.

///Peter