Re: [xml-dev] Don’t create elements with simple content and attributes
On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 11:06 AM Ihe Onwuka <[email protected]> wrote:Whereas by implication of what you have said you want to claim that
<Cost>8.95</Cost>is explicitly labeled.So to flesh out your claim. Somehow the presence of the attribute on the Cost element interferes with what you are calling explicit labelling.Except that it doesn't.
I think Roger's point is that a cost, like a length or a mass, is meaningless without a unit. "What does that cost?" "Five." "Five what? Dollars, cents, dinars, zlotys, razbuckniks?" So he is arguing that the two components of a cost, the numeric part and the unit, each should be explicitly marked up. I think he is clearly right about the first point, and arguably right about the other, at least for XML-as-data.
When SGML/XML were all about textual documents, the role of attributes was fairly clear: marginal notes or commentaries on the text. In that context, you want to preserve the text as is, and <quote><currency value="5" unit="USD>Five.</currency></quote> makes a lot of sense. Note that this meets Roger's criterion for explicit markup.
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John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan [email protected]
Almost all theorems are true, but almost all proofs have bugs.
--Paul Pedersen