I have recently been playing around with an e-commerce product and noticed the regular use of calling an external page through braces {}.

The use of this is really good and I would like to learn more about how it works. I was led to believe that this is called macros but can't seem to find anything anywhere about it.

Therefore I was wondering if anybody might know any articles or tutorials out there that would point me in the right direction.

Thanks,
Dan

You might want to just start by reading the manual or documentation for the ecommerce product you are using. Brackets to call an external page like that are not a means that is implemented by HTML, so you won't find any general information about this practice on the internet. Likely, the ecommerce package you are using is just programmed to read this pattern, then substitute appropriate information based on how it is programmed.

Cheers

Generally the { } are called curyl (or place-holder) brackets, which can store things like a users name, address, city, state zipcode etc..etc.. They're usually put into 'template' files or files that have the ability to process what ever is inside of those { curly brackets } Sometimes you might see a newsletter in the the shopping cart application have a default newsletter that starts out like:

Dear { User_First_Name },

...............
.......
....

The information inside of the { } is the users_first name which is in your shopping carts user database for example. The { } can be used for just about anything.

Btw, are you using the Smarty Template Engine by chance?

Hope you understand