[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Content v. attribute
> From: Vrijland, Jacco TRC-OGRS/2 > The first would provide me with an easy mechanism to check whether it > has been provided or not, the second seems more natural. Using the first > option is more consistent, though, I can think of no reason why the > description should be treated differently from the other attributes. One approach is to make sure all your documents are clearly marked up to tell you which version of your DTD you are using (even if you never actually use a DTD, at least have a DOCTYPE declaration or Processing Intruction or top-level attribute to give you some kind of version numbering!). If you also have the freedom to rewrite your software, this gives you the ability to try attributes now, and shift over to elements later. Why should you care? Let experience with your particular data and applications be your guide. People often underestimate how complicated their data is, and they prematurely put things into attributes. But that is not bad, just natural. The opposite is to blanketly put everything into elements. There is a kind of metadata which is not "data about data" but "data about elements" (i.e. data about markup) which frequently is exactly what an attribute should be used for. Marking them up with elements would IMHO probable mess up the structure of data, or at least make a whole lot of ugly elements. In particular, ID attributes and the xml:lang attibute. If you are using DTDs, then NOTATION attributes and ENTITY attributes fit in there too. If you are not using these then you may find yourself uncompelled to use many attributes. Attributes are also available at the end of the start tag, which provides a nice and natural breathing point for setting up how to process the subsequent contents of the element. This is essential for practical stream processing. Rick Jelliffe 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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