[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: [SML] Whether to support Attribute or not?
> -----Original Message----- > From: Clark C. Evans [mailto:clark.evans@m...] > Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 1:59 AM > > > Is having a syntax level distinction between information and > information about the information (meta information) necessary? > Ok, but you get a cleaner formulation if you drop the language about info/metainfo from your question. None of that matters, since the issue is purely syntactic - users can use the syntactic devices in whatever way they choose. So the question is really just whether or not we need two distinct syntactic devices. Doesn't even matter what they're called - in fact calling them "foo" and "bar" syntax would probably clarify things, since "attribute" and "element" carry lots of semantic freight on their own. The entire discussion about what attributes and elements "mean" is very interesting but not terribly useful, since there is no need to define them semantically. My own opinion fwiw is that having two such devices is well worth it, precisely because with them I can model ordinary intuitions about the world - things and their properties. Sometimes that might mean info and metainfo. In any case, I don't think anybody will seriously argue against the proposition that chopping the world into related things (structures) on the one hand and properties (attributes) on the other is pretty dadgummed useful. My keyboard has a bunch of keys (structure), but it doesn't have beige. Obviously one can model beige as a thing it has, and in some cases it may make sense to do so, but there will always be people and situations where you want to model ordinary intuition, in which e.g. color is percieved as a property of a thing. Collapsing the syntax into a single abstract structuring mechanism would just increase the distance between the language syntax and ordinary discourse. -gregg 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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