Plural Synonyms

Problem

It’s easy to forget whether the correct spelling of some of the TAL attributes is plural or not. In particular, a prominent member of the ZPT community used ‘tal:contents’ instead of ‘tal:content’.

Proposal

Make synonyms for all of the TAL statements for which it is reasonable to have both the singular and plural forms. In particular:

• content / contents
• attribute / attributes
• define / defines
• on-error / on-errors

We would never have given any of these new names a different meaning for fear of confusing users, so it seems reasonable to me to give them the same meaning. I omitted ‘conditions’, since that implies (to me) that it allows multiple conditions. I don’t have a strong reason for leaving out ‘replaces’ and ‘repeats’, just a vague feeling that they’re unlikely to suffer from the same confusion, since they are verbs and don’t accept multiple parts.

Comments

peterbe (Jul 16, 2001 4:01 am; Comment #1) –

-1 NO!

I agree with myself that this will only cause confusion. The Python “only one” is better. It isn’t that difficult to remember these things.

mindlace (Jul 18, 2001 2:10 pm; Comment #2) –

-1 TOOWTDI

poster (Jul 31, 2001 11:31 am; Comment #3) –

-1