[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC
> At 12:48 PM 09/22/99 +0200, Carsten Oberscheid wrote: > >In a classical document markup environment, attributes are an > >important means to separate document content from metadata. > > But when you're writing the DTD, how do you know what is > "content" and what > is "metadata"? 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. The question of whether attributes *should* be storing this kind of metadata seems to be another question entirely. If XML is a data format then why clutter XML documents with processing hints? Couldn't this data be captured separately in a second document and used alongside the first? XLinks/Pointers could be used to refer to specific elements. The 'metadata' is actually data for the processing application. What happens if you change the processing application, or need more parameters or info? Say you started out with a simple attribute, but later on down the line you need (say) the XML equivalent of a RDBMS data dictionary, or similar. Thats not a situation thats likely to arise with an in-house or closed application and its documents. For something like XML-RPC I think Dave Winer has taken the right view of being cautious. Mixing metadata in with data seems IMHO to be (warm :) fuzzy modelling. I'm certainly guilty of it. Or am I completely nuts? :) L. 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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