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On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Frank Blau wrote: > Is there a formal rule for the use of Atrributes vs Elements? The > assumption I am going on (per The XML Primer) is that Attributes are > best used to communicate information to the browser/application, and > Elements are best used for actual Data. Is this a valid assumption? Whatever seems to work best for your application is the best assumption. In addition, I have found that sometimes I want to *prevent* further structuring of data (and make this clear to users), and those items get placed in attributes. They're flat and they stay that way. You should also check the attribute normalization sections - if you are doing validation, then you can get the parser to do more work for you in some cases - and if it is justified by your application. > In an EDI transaction, I was going to put the Header and Trailer > information in attributes, with the actual Detail Segments as > Elements... My specific reaction here is that all of the Header and Trailer and Detail Segments information is always there - XML or not. As such, I would try to treat all of these items equally. If you are coming from a 'record' model of data, you can either have 'one element = one record' where all the fields are attributes, or you could have 'one field = one element' and records are grouped by parent elements. You as the designer have to decide which model serves your needs better. You should also pay attention to the ongoing namespaces work, since it seems (myu opinion) to affect the degree of control you can exert on content through the DTD and validation. I'm beginning to suspect that this might be one underlying reason for the (again, my opinion) increased polarization on namespaces following the most recent Working Draft. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Smith <smith@i...> xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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