[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• From: ari@c... (K. Ari Krupnikov)
• Date: 23 Jun 2003 01:10:37 -0700
• In-reply-to: <3EF69C0B.9060106@t...>
• References: <30.41cb03f7.2c278d3c@a...><16118.15157.897940.556175@m...><3EF69C0B.9060106@t...>
• Sender: ari@l...
• User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2

Tim, you've been playing in this field much longer than I have. So
tell me where I got things wrong.

Tim Bray <tbray@t...> writes:

> I always felt vaguely guilty
> about the existence of attributes, but that <a href="x">y</a> idiom
> seems so smooth and more idiomatic than any other syntax I can
> imagine, that it long ago reconciled me to them.  I haven't been able
> to work out the abstractions and metaphysics of why this feels so
> right, beyond vague hand-waving

I'm not sure where I got it from, but I seem to have this notion that
character data are what a human reader should see, while markup,
including attributes, is something of a hint to software.

> But then why not five?

There are characters in a document and (meta)information about the
characters.  Some of those metadata can be predefined, e.g.,
html:title, and that leads to element tags; sometimes you need free
text, such as for an href, which leads to attributes.

So I see three things - text, predefined metadata and free-form
metadata. I can't immediately think of three more kinds of metadata
I'd want in a document.

> I think unordered attributes, and dictionary type
> structures to model them in software, are way out on the plus side of
> the cost-benefit equation as a design decision in SGML and XML.

Ari.

• References:
  • Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...
  • Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
    • From: David Megginson <david@m...>
  • Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• Next by Date: RE: markup, UI (Re: Attribute Order)
• Previous by thread: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• Next by thread: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread