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- From: Mark Nutter <mnutter@fore.com>
- To: <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 08:14:37 -0400
At 11:07 AM 09/21/99 -0700, Jeff Greif wrote:
>For certain kinds of applications, I find the opposite style -- attributes
>only and no PCDATA -- works best... It was
>extremely convenient to be able to easily denote which attributes needed
>to
>be present, to provide default values, insist on values from an enumerated
>set (thus avoiding misspellings)...
This is the reason, in a nutshell, why XML needs attributes -- XML (and
SGML) DTD's don't have any mechanism for specifying default/enumerated
values for PCDATA content. But now, suppose we had some kind of standard
schema mechanism that allowed us to say things like "Content must be a
date" or "Content must be numeric" or "Default value is 'Left'" and so
on. If we could constrain the character data contained within an element
in the same way(s) we constrain attributes, would we still need attributes?
Disclaimer: I know various schema proposals are on the table, but I'm not
familiar with any of them.
Oh well, 0.02 international monetary unit's worth...
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Mark Nutter, <mnutter@fore.com>
Internet Applications Developer
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