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Re: malfunctioning, evil adult as XML

• To: "Seairth Jacobs" <seairth@s...>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: malfunctioning, evil adult as XML
• From: "James Clark" <jjc@j...>
• Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:03:23 +0700
• References: <r01050400-1023-0FD4EC4934C111D791DA0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]> <000401c2c8d9$fb52a0f0$a800a8c0@SeairthA31>

> Hmm... just looks like flamewar bait to me.  Or maybe I just lost sight of
> the substance among all that noise.

It seems age has not mellowed Erik.  However, hidden amongst all the abuse I
think there is food for thought.

> Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes.
> (You will then find that you do not need them at all.)

I think Erik's right that attributes in XML are a mess.  Either

- they ought to have be able to structured values, just like elements (i.e.
one could view the content of an element as a special unnamed attribute), or

- they should be removed entirely.

Then there's

- the whole mess of attribute value normalization

- the whole mess with namespace declarations that look like attributes but
aren't really attributes (which apart from confusion implies the parser has
to see the whole start-tag before it can report the element name or any
qualified attribute names)

The non-uniformity between elements and attributes has a huge cost.  It
doesn't just add extra complexity to parsers, but it adds complexity to
almost everything built on top of XML (XSLT, schema, DOM, ...).

Whether there's any hope of ever fixing this is a separate issue.

James

> From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
> >
> > I'm afraid I arrived on the markup scene too late to encounter Erik
> > Naggum directly, though maybe someday I'll have the pleasure.
> >
> > Meanwhile, this is over the top but does contain some interesting food
> > for thought on issues that plague this list.  Parental guidance
> > suggested, as well as some calming exercises before and after reading
> > it:
> >
> > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=%3C3250033069468718%40naggum.no%3E
>
>
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    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>

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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
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