Inside XML

All About Attributes

Attributes are name/value pairs that you can use in start and empty tags to add additional information. We've already seen in Chapter 2, "Creating Well-Formed XML Documents," that you can set up attributes as easily in XML as in HTML. Here's an example showing several attributes:

<CUSTOMER LAST_NAME="Smith" FIRST_NAME="Sam"
    DATE="October 15, 2001" PURCHASE="Tomatoes"
    PRICE="$1.25" NUMBER="8" />

In this case, I'm indicating that the customer's last name is Smith; that his first name is Sam; that the date of the current purchase is October 15, 2001; and that Sam purchased eight tomatoes for a total cost of $1.25.

Because you can declare elements in DTDs, you might expect that you can declare attributes as well, and you'd ...