[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC
At 03:53 PM 09/22/99 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote: >For example, if you have a genealogy DTD, and you're > > representing things like: > > > > Biological father > > Biological mother > > Location where birth certificate is recorded > > Place of birth > > Date of birth > >I believe by metadata the original author meant information which should >be used as processing instructions or hints to the application processing >the document. I'd say that none of the items you list fall into that >category so they're content. That's certainly a valid point of view, but consider: <record_of_birth src="Penobscot County Courthouse, ME"> <father>Paul</father> <mother>Kathleen</mother> ... </record_of_birth> In the above, the location where the birth certificate is stored is given as an attribute of a <record_of_birth> element, so it's ostensibly "metadata". Yet, depending on the application that's processing the information, the location of the physical birth record might very well be content. Attributes might make sense for a DTD that was intentionally tied (restricted?) to a predefined process, but isn't part of the strength of XML supposed to be that the same XML file can be processed in more than one way? Attributes seem to "fossilize" one particular perspective of the data, at the expense of alternative ways of looking at the information. -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- Mark Nutter, <mnutter@f...> Internet Applications Developer FORE Systems Some people are atheists 'til the day they die. 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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