[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC
At 08:49 AM 9/21/99 -0700, Dave Winer wrote: >I agree that attributes are an unfortunate and unnecessary redundancy in >XML. I was not that wrong-headed guy from Microsoft, but if I knew who it >was, I would agree with him. BTW, a very interesting discussion is happening >over on the XML-RPC DG. It's not an exact replay of the discussions we had >last year. Dave There's a repeating pattern here. When I first discovered SGML (in 1987) I quickly decided that attributes were an unnecessary and superfluous redundancy, and single-handedly transduced the 572 MB of the Oxford English Dictionary text to reflect that viewpoint. I've noticed this pattern in others besides myself and Dave. People who come to generic markup with a lot of experience in technology don't see why you need two different syntaxes for labeling information. Years later, I got used to it. From the programmer's point of view, there's no difference in the degree-of-difficulty of extracting info from elements and attributes. And in the (large, important) subset of XML where the information is created and handled directly by humans, I have observed that people get a warm fuzzy glow from attributes and find XML more readable when some stuff is in attributes. So... why struggle? -Tim 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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