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From: "James Clark" <jjc@jclark.com>
>
> 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.
Understandable. In an XML alternative I created, that was one of the first
things to go.
> 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, ...).
True again.
> Whether there's any hope of ever fixing this is a separate issue.
Nope. Not inside of XML, anyhow.
---
Seairth Jacobs
seairth@seairth.com
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