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Tim, you've been playing in this field much longer than I have. So tell me where I got things wrong. Tim Bray <tbray@t...> writes: > I always felt vaguely guilty > about the existence of attributes, but that <a href="x">y</a> idiom > seems so smooth and more idiomatic than any other syntax I can > imagine, that it long ago reconciled me to them. I haven't been able > to work out the abstractions and metaphysics of why this feels so > right, beyond vague hand-waving I'm not sure where I got it from, but I seem to have this notion that character data are what a human reader should see, while markup, including attributes, is something of a hint to software. > But then why not five? There are characters in a document and (meta)information about the characters. Some of those metadata can be predefined, e.g., html:title, and that leads to element tags; sometimes you need free text, such as for an href, which leads to attributes. So I see three things - text, predefined metadata and free-form metadata. I can't immediately think of three more kinds of metadata I'd want in a document. > I think unordered attributes, and dictionary type > structures to model them in software, are way out on the plus side of > the cost-benefit equation as a design decision in SGML and XML. Ari.
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