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RE: RE: Take 2 - How do you replace comments from XML?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: RE: Take 2 - How do you replace comments from XML?
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 10:56:00 -0500
• In-reply-to: <BKELLDAGKABIOCHDFDBPKEGLCCAA.danny666@v...>

danny666@v... (Danny Ayers) writes:
>I'm curious Simon (or anyone) about how you would go about improving
>the representation of keys & values (or modelling when the solution
>seems to suggest keys & values).

Most of the key/value situations I've seen have fixed sets of keys, or
at least as fixed as most markup vocabularies.

So instead of:

<add key="a" value="1"/>
<add key="b" value="2"/>

I'd prefer something like:

<add>
  <a>1</a>
  <b>2</b>
</add>

Even where the keys aren't fixed, I still prefer this model.  It leaves
open the prospect of structured values, which are pretty common in the
hashmaps I work with, and it's not that much harder to process.  

It's harder to write a schema for this if you're one of those people who
insist on nailing everything to the floor, but I guess I have little
sympathy for those folks.  If the information is flexible, the schema
should keep up, and hiding structure in attribute values seems like a
lousy hack given XML's focus on labeled structures.

But hey, if it's just a serialization, why should anyone care?

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

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    • From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>

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