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"Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > It would also open up the prospect of treating other compounds - like the > CSS style attribute, some of the path information in SVG, and various other > places where the principle of one chunk, one string has been violated - as > a set of atoms which could themselves be validated and/or transformed > and/or typed. > > This leads to another kinds of post-processing infoset, where the atoms are > available as an ordered set of child nodes, but it seems like a promising road. If I understand what Simon wishes to do, it is similar to what I wished for in a late March post to this list and also in comments I made to W3C requesting a regular expression syntax that allowed datatypes to be defined as regular expression atoms. The start of the thread can be found at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2001JanMar/0425.html The thread continues in the April to June comments at: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2001AprJun/0008.html My motivation was to specify an attribute as a numeric value with units of measure attached to it for absolute clarity. (Ask NASA how important this might be. They lost a Mars probe because numbers had no units associated with it and one group assumed metric while the other group was specifying English.) Using a pattern restriction as a template to identify atoms of interest within an attribute is similar to the ordering of elements in a structure. Is it redundant? Maybe. Is it "good" markup? Probably not. Is it a useful, alternative way to specify information? I believe so. Since the only guideline for when one should use attributes vs. elements is "It depends upon the application.", I don't see this further structuring, parsing, and use of attributes as fundamentally wrong given that it has clear functionality for certain developers and users of XML. -- Steve Rosenberry Sr. Partner Electronic Solutions Company -- For the Home of Integration http://ElectronicSolutionsCo.com http://BetterGoBids.com -- The Premier GoTo Bid Management Tool (610) 670-1710
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