[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: When is an attribute an attribute?
Roy Tennant wrote: > > I've been trying to figure this out for a while with no success. > When and why would you choose one over another? > > <BOOK TITLE="The Call of the Wild" AUTHOR="London, Jack"\> > > <BOOK AUTHOR="London, Jack">The Call of the Wild</BOOK> > > <BOOK> > <TITLE>The Call of the Wild</TITLE> > <AUTHOR>London, Jack</AUTHOR> > </BOOK> I find it useful to think about the kinds of things you will want to do with your new XML documents like indexing and sharing data with a database. You may also be worried about disk space and the speed of indexing & retrieval. I always try to 1) Minimize redundancy in my data and 2) maximize the utility of my data. Since attrubutes are more strongly typed, I usually reserve them for unique databse keys: #1 <book id='callwild'><title>The Call of the Wild</title></book> or a text string that I wish to sort by: #2 <book id='callwild' sortform='Call of the Wild, The'><title>The Call of the Wild</title></book> If you're not worried about databases then you don't need the ID attribute, but the SORTFORM attribute might come in handy. If you go total database then you could have: #3 <book id='callwild'/> But doing this means you'd lose the ability to search on the book with an indexer (but not with an SQL query). Plus, it's less person-readable. Personally, I like #1. -- Jason R. Cupp (jcupp@e...) Deasy GeoGraphics The Pennsylvania State University xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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