[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Attributes v Elements
Tim Bray wrote: "data the way it actually is" ----- Data is abstract. You can represent it however you like. For example, if you only use attributes, you avoid mixed content entirely. Is mixed content "bad?" Are attributes "bad?" It depends on who you ask. There is no "yes" or "no" here, only the author's preference which XML will gladly oblige, leaving newbies with more questions than they started with. In Perl, "there is more than one way to do it." With XML we have the same thing. However, it's pretty obvious when a Perl program "works" but not so obvious whether an XML schema works. That's the nature of models. There are many roads to success, and stumbling blocks along the way. A memo is a representation of complex data. We don't have to represent the data in memo form but it is sometimes convenient to do so. Convenient for humans maybe, but not for computers that might have to operate on the data beyond displaying it on a glass screen. Perhaps some day, a mark-up language for human language will exist. This has been the subject of natual language processing for quite some time. But I digress. The decision to put text inside or outside angle brackets or whether to start an element in a text block is ... arbitrary. These design decisions have nothing to do with the data in its "real" form, because data has no real form. Data is not the thing itself. Sometimes, such as the case with XHTML, it depends on what you intend to do with the data. But when it comes to data modeling, seldom do we have the luxury of knowing up front the complete universe of data consumers. To the author of this thread, my advice is: experiment, explore, find what works for you, and stick with it. http://xmleverywhere.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Bray" <tbray@t...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 3:31 PM Subject: Re: Attributes v Elements doing XHTML in the absence of mixed content would be horribly painful. One of the nice things about XML is that it usually can model the data the way it actually is, not the way you want to idealize it.
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