xml-dev - Re: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC

[Carsten Oberscheid <co@daisybytes.su.uunet.de>]

At 11:29 27.09.99 -0400, Mark Nutter wrote:
>What about genealogies, commentaries, dictionaries, linguistic analyses, 
>grammars, translations, and such?  It seems to me that there are lots of 
>text documents in which the distinction between content and metadata is 
>less than clear.  Even when the distinction is clear, it can still be 
>problematic to try and map "metadata->attribute" and 
>"content->child-element". If you're marking up one of Shakespeare's plays, 
>and you want to add footnotes explaining archaic English usages, your 
>footnotes are conceptually metadata, but pragmatically speaking it could be 
>awkward to represent each one as an attribute.
>

I don't want to do that. In a *simple* document markup application, putting
metadata in attributes can make processing easier. If the meta information
gets more complex, elements may be more appropriate. This makes processing
less easy, and at some point, the application isn't simple anymore. Still
attributes are a valueable means for those who are.

<hairsplit-mode>
As soon as I add footnotes and annotations to a Shakespeare edition, one
could argue that I'm creating a piece of secondary literature. From this
perspective, the annotation is content, as well. As you say, the
distinction is less than clear.
</hairsplit-mode>

.co.

---------------------------------------------- daisy bytes! ---------
 Carsten Oberscheid                                
 co@daisybytes.su.uunet.de              digital document processing
 http://www.pweb.de/daisybytes.su           electronic publishing


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