Proposed resolution of attribute contextualization rule

A second unresolved issue from last Friday's telecon was attribute contextualization. In short, the question was which of the following was correct:

#1:  =markus+first<+name>&/&/”.....”
#2:  =markus<+first><+name>&/&/”.....”

On the TC call I argued for #1, because +first itself was not an attribute. However in discussing it this weekend with Markus I realized there was a much stronger argument for #2: to contextualize an attribute you MUST use only other attributes because all attributes must ultimately describe the entity they follow.

In other words, <+first> MUST be an attribute in the example above because <+name> is ultimately an attribute of =markus, not of +first.

If everyone agrees, then we just discovered another key rule of using XDI syntax that we will express in XDI Core.

=Drummond