On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 14:07 -0800, Don Russell wrote: > I thought there was a way in html to define an "entity" and then use > that throughout the document. > > So, for example I might have something that appears in multiple places > but I only want to code it once: > > I was thinking of something like... > <meta entity="callno" content="1(123)555-1212"/> Quickly looking at <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/>, it looks like you can create new entities for referencing particular characters (e.g. you can make your own ®istered; to refer to the character used to represent ®), but it doesn't seem to suggest that you can use it for a whole string of characters. > Then I could use &callno; in the body of the document and the browser > would properly substitute the specified value. > > I suppose I could write a little javascript function and then use > <script>...</script> to call it as needed and the function would use > document.write.... but that really is overkill, and I'd prefer not to > REQUIRE javascript. > > Any suggestions? Non-XHTML alternative solutions: Search and replace in your text editor, if it's for a once off authoring solution. SSI for webpages that might need their variables updated. I do that for my price lists. One "include" source gets updated, and any page that refers to some particular item's price shows the current one.
