[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: DTD Question: Attributes vs Elements
At 02:33 PM 3/19/99 -0500, Kurt Donath wrote: > >What is the criteria for selecting when to define data as an attribute >or element in a DTD? > >Simon says attributes are an "excellent tool for passing along extra >information about your element to an automated processor - a parser, a >browser, or a conversion tool. They are NOT a good place to actually >store data". Simon continues, "generally, you should use attributes to >store information that may not be useful to humans directly but may help >computers process the element properly." > >Would anyone like to add or differ with this? I'll just clarify a little bit. In my (highly religious and thoroughly debatable) viewpoint, attributes are pretty much like annotations. In a few cases - empty elements in particular, where the attributes are the only 'real' content - attributes do have a direct impact on the content. Nonetheless, I'm much happier seeing attributes as a description of the element - more a metadata role - than providing content. If you use XML in a display environment that isn't oriented toward transformation, say CSS, the implications are pretty simple: users will see the element content directly, if you let them, while the attribute content is used to generate the presentation, not the content. From my perspective, elements contain 'first class' textual content for humans, while attributes contain information that people will typically access directly only through an editor. In other environments, attributes may seem more or less worthy of storing content. From a programmer's perspective, elements and attributes are just different implementations of about the same thing, and RDF's many syntaxes make this quite clear. I've definitely softened my strong opinions about this dichotomy, though I certainly know what style I prefer when I go to write my own DTDs. Simon St.Laurent XML: A Primer Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies http://www.simonstl.com 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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