On 12/21/13 4:31 PM, James Fuller wrote:
> Simon St. Laurent went fishing in this post
>
> http://markmail.org/thread/lfn7blhch5vzchnp
>
> and no one took the bait ... I thought xml-dev would go an entire year
> w/o the elements vs attributes permatopic ... how wrong I am.
Roger is generally a better fisherman than I am. He's smart to ask on
this list about XML-specific issues, rather than wandering to markup or
(God forbid) HTML.
> Its the holidays so lets put some fuel to the fire;
I'm not sure whether it helps the fire, but your rules are pretty much
the same advice I give to people with these questions.
Thanks!
Simon
> Rule #1 - If you don't know how to use attributes, use an element ... an
> element can represent everything you need to use w/o the conceptual
> overload. Feel free to complain to anyone who will listen.
>
> Rule #2 - If you have information that itself does not need to be marked
> up then you might have a candidate for an attribute. Alternately if you
> have content that you insist on having no structure/markup then an
> attribute might be for you.
>
> Rule #3 - When you use attributes, you don't care about whitespace, you
> don't care about sorting ... in fact think of it as a magical place
> which lives out of band in a non dimensional space(I didnt say anything
> about ns right ...). There could be optimisation opportunities here if
> one cared about it.
>
> I don't think of name value pairs as the right canonical example of
> attributes ... its looking at XML purely through the 'data prism', as a
> compromise it will do in a pinch ...
>
> from the 'document prism' the commonplace anchor tag demonstrates
> succinctly why an attribute may be useful, but c'est la vie, others may
> argue otherwise.
>
> To me XML does something interesting in that it roughly
> externalizes/mirrors a parse tree that would get built internally when
> you do anything with it (represent data, document or a programming
> language) ... attributes give you another leaf type to play with and
> there is where the sweet siren song can lead one astray when designing a
> markup language (and thinking too far ahead of how you are going to
> process it).
>
> Anyhow lets see if we can push another 100+ thread out before the New Year!
>
> Jim Fuller
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 9:39 PM, Costello, Roger L. <
> <mailto:>> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> Why did the founding fathers of XML create attributes?
>
> XML attributes are weird.
>
> They make XML documents dirty, messy, cluttered, and, well, ugly.
>
> XML elements are a perfectly satisfying way of defining name-value
> pairs. XML attributes is a special (i.e., extra, extraneous,
> redundant) way of including name-value pairs in the XML. That's awful.
>
> Unless ....... the creators of XML intended attributes for another
> purpose.
>
> I am reading a wonderful book on parsing and it talks about
> extending grammars with attributes; those attributes are used to
> specify the grammar's semantics.
>
> Hey, XML is a grammar: that's what XSD and RNG are all about, they
> define grammars.
>
> So maybe what the founding fathers of XML really had in mind with
> attributes is that they be used to enrich XML grammars with semantic
> information?
>
> Are any of the original founding fathers of XML out there? What were
> you thinking when you put attributes into XML? Perhaps you were
> thinking of attribute grammars?
>
> /Roger
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/
