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RE: Six Reasons Not to use XML Attributes

• From: <vojtech.toman@emc.com>
• To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 09:47:17 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Lee [mailto:dlee@calldei.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 3:30 PM
> To: Andrew Welch; Costello, Roger L.
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE:  Six Reasons Not to use XML Attributes
> 
> While I agree it makes it bulkier, I disagree with the argument
> specifics.
> That is "looking ahead" is only a side effect of a particular parser
> implementation.
> 
> i.e.
> if a parser reads
> 
> 
> <thing
> 
> 
> It has to look ahead in both cases
> A)   id="abc"
> B)  ><id>abc<
> 
> 
> It just happens that most XML parsers do this lookahead thing for you
> for attributes (and some do it for elements) ... but its not intrinsic
> in XML.

The difference that I see is that attributes are not structured and therefore the "look-ahead" is reasonably bounded - whereas in the case of elements, they can contain arbitrarily deep and nested structures (with additional nested "look-aheads").

Vojtech

• References:
  • Six Reasons Not to use XML Attributes
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: Six Reasons Not to use XML Attributes
    • From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
  • RE: Six Reasons Not to use XML Attributes
    • From: David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>