Can someone explain the attr?

I am looking at the Honeycomb Gallery sample code (here) and I ran across the following code while trying to add action items in my own app:

<item android:id="@+id/camera"
    android:title="Camera"
    android:icon="?attr/menuIconCamera"
    android:showAsAction="ifRoom" />

The ?attr is throwing me for a loop. Can someone please explain what this is doing? How is this related to a drawable? I can't seem to find any good information on Google. Also is there a listing or gallery of attributes we can use for icons instead of just menuIconCamera?

Thanks

Edit: I did some more looking around and found that attrs.xml looks like this:

<resources>
<declare-styleable name="AppTheme">
    <attr name="listDragShadowBackground" format="reference" />
    <attr name="menuIconCamera" format="reference" />
    <attr name="menuIconToggle" format="reference" />
    <attr name="menuIconShare" format="reference" />
</declare-styleable>

Unfortunately that just makes it even more confusing for me. What is this doing?

The ?attr/menuIconCamera value means that an icon from menuIconCamera attribute of the current theme will be used.

There must be a drawable assigned to the menuIconCamera attribute somewhere in the themes.xml file. If there're two themes with different values of this attribute then actual icon will depend on a theme which is currently used.

The attrs.xml file is used to define custom attributes. Without this definition compiler will treat unknown attributes as erroneous.

The ?attr: syntax is used for accessing attributes of current theme. See referencing style attributes.

I know this post is very old, but I feel the following explanation will help beginners understand it easily.

So in layman's terms,

someAttribute="?attr/attributeName" means -

set the value of someAttribute to whatever is the value of attributeName in current theme

A common example occurs in styling a Toolbar

<style name="AppTheme" parent="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">
        <item name="colorPrimary">@color/primary_color</item>
       //some more stuff here
</style>
<!-- custom toolbar style -->
<style name="myToolbar" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Toolbar">
      <item name="android:background">?attr/colorPrimary</item>
     //some code here
</style>

Here value of android:background will be set to @color/primary_color because ?attr/colorPrimary refers to @color/primary_color in the current theme (AppTheme)

Can someone explain the attr?

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