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Re: What are the practical, negative consequences ofthinking t

• From: u123724 <u123724@gmail.com>
• To: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
• Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:18:53 +0100

In addition to what Michael, Rick, and David said, a "practical,
negative consequence of thinking that attributes are metadata", for
me, is to think too much about attributes/elements from an
epistemological-hermeneutical point of view, when attributes are
invented just as a vehicle to notate additional non-content in a
situation where you type plain text in a text editor.

Another "practical, negative consequence of thinking that attributes
are metadata", for me, is the vague concept that a CSS property is
different from (or should be different from) an attribute, and should
be represented in a syntax different from that of attributes.

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 5:09 PM, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> wrote:
>> Can you give me a concrete, practical example showing where bad things
>> happen because someone thought that attributes are metadata?
>
> No, but there has been a widely known case of the opposite: treating
> attributes as data (text).  The example would be html:img/@title or
> html:img/@alt  for example.  In some markup systems, they want to mark up
> some internationalization metadata on spans of text, for example to reverse
> the directionality of the text for BDI (right to left, and left to right):
> perfect for mixed content, but cannot be done in attribute values.  (And so,
> people would use the Unicode BDI characters for this; not necessarily a bad
> thing.)  There are many other cases where Unicode needs to be augmented with
> markup, for example to select the correct character variants for Chinese
> (T&S), Japanese and Korean characters, where the author needs the exact
> character independent of what Han Unification says and what the document
> language settings might be.
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 2:24 AM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> Consider this XML:
>>
>> <Book binding="hardcover">
>>     <Title>Software Abstractions</Title>
>>     <Author>Daniel Jackson</Author>
>> </Book>
>>
>> I often hear people say that attributes are metadata. For example,
>> @binding is metadata.
>>
>> David Carlisle likes to remind me that there is nothing in the XML
>> specification which says that attributes are metadata. In fact, the XML
>> specification does not even use the word "metadata."
>>
>> So when I hear people talking about attributes being metadata, I channel
>> David Carlisle and tell them that attributes are not metadata.
>>
>> But I'm thinking this is a lost cause. The belief that attributes are
>> metadata is too widespread.
>>
>> Besides, what difference does it make if people think that attributes are
>> metadata? Can you give me a concrete, practical example showing where bad
>> things happen because someone thought that attributes are metadata?
>>
>> /Roger
>>
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• References:
  • What are the practical, negative consequences of thinking thatattributes are metadata?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: What are the practical, negative consequences ofthinking that attributes are metadata?
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>