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[Simon St.Laurent]
>
> A lot of people have been storing data in attributes rather than in
> element content. There are lot of reasons for this, ranging from a more
> compact form to simpler processing in SAX. (Attributes are presented as
> a convenient group, while you have to wait for child elements)
>
> The problem with using attributes for data is that there is no direct
> way to associate metadata with attribute content. There is a very easy
> direct way to associate metadata with element content - it's called
> attributes. Adding additional information about attributes requires
> either external sources (DTDs, schemas) or XPath (which I believe XForms
> uses) or various ad-hocery. Direct serialization of any of this gets
> ugly very quickly.
>
Just think how you could switch things around!
<rowset>
<metadata>
<att name='col1'>
<type>integer</type>
<appinfo>....</appinfo>
<data_dictionary><range>0..123</range></data_dictionary>
</att>
...
</metadata>
<row col1='1' col2='dog' col3='123.45.67'>
</row>
</rowset>
Cheers,
Tom P
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