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From: "James Clark" <jjc@j...> > I think Erik's right that attributes in XML are a mess. Either > > - they ought to have be able to structured values, just like elements (i.e. > one could view the content of an element as a special unnamed attribute), or > > - they should be removed entirely. Is there any structured "attribute" which cannot be represented now using IDREF? Why invent a new syntax, or a new naming convention (xml:information-item="attribute"?), or a new pragma annotator? XML has two pragmatics built-in that almost everyone uses: - some children of elements can be relied on to be available unordered before the other children are, to help stream processing (attributes) - some children of elements are global, unconstrained and, in a pinch, forgettable (PIs and comments) It may be that RELAX NG's interleave (or Schematron too) is powerful enough that a schema language can express this constraint. But why make it unreliable: it needs to be a syntactic (or architectural thing) rather than a schema constraint. > The non-uniformity between elements and attributes has a huge cost. But how much is that cost compared to the costs of "improvement". Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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