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From: "James Clark" <jjc@j...> > > It seems age has not mellowed Erik. However, hidden amongst all the abuse I > think there is food for thought. > > > Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes. > > (You will then find that you do not need them at all.) > > 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. Understandable. In an XML alternative I created, that was one of the first things to go. > Then there's > > - the whole mess of attribute value normalization > > - the whole mess with namespace declarations that look like attributes but > aren't really attributes (which apart from confusion implies the parser has > to see the whole start-tag before it can report the element name or any > qualified attribute names) > > The non-uniformity between elements and attributes has a huge cost. It > doesn't just add extra complexity to parsers, but it adds complexity to > almost everything built on top of XML (XSLT, schema, DOM, ...). True again. > Whether there's any hope of ever fixing this is a separate issue. Nope. Not inside of XML, anyhow. --- Seairth Jacobs seairth@s...
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