Living documents with XML events (3/4) - exploring XML

Living documents with XML events

Attaching to the Observer

All the attributes from the listener element with the exception of id may be used as global attributes, to attach the attributes to other elements. This means that the <listener> element is, strictly speaking, redundant, since the following

<anyelement ev:event="activate"
 ev:observer="button1" ev:handler="#click"/>

would have the same effect as the earlier example.

Attaching to the Handler

If, when attaching the global attributes to an element, the handler attribute is omitted, then the element that the other attributes are attached to is the handler element.

Note that, since the observer and target attributes are IDREFs, in this case the handler and observer/target elements must be in the same document (while in other cases, since the handler attribute is a URI, the handler element may be in another document).

If the observer attribute is also omitted, then the parent of the handler element is the observer element.

The <script> element is the handler for event click; the <img> element is the observer:

<img src="button.gif" alt="OK">
    <script ev:event="ev:activate" type="application/x-javascript">
        doactivate(event);
    </script>
</img>

Attribute Defaults

The following table summarizes which elements play the role of observer or handler if the relevant attribute is omitted.

	Handler present	Handler omitted
Observer present	(As declared)	Element is handler
Observer omitted	Element is observer	Element is handler Parent is observer

Event Handlers

This specification does not require an XML application that uses XML Events to use any particular method for specifying handlers. It is however recognized that two methods are likely to occur often: scripting (such as HTML's <script> element) and declarative markup using XML elements (such as WML's <onevent> element). A companion specification will provide markup to support these methods.

Naming events is also left to the individual application.

Produced by Michael Claßen

URL: https://www.webreference.com/xml/column43/3.html
Created: Nov 12, 2001
Revised: Nov 12, 2001