• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Attribute Order (Was: Create XML )
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 09:51:19 -0400
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1026-773FF4A3A4B211D78EFB0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <r01050400-1026-773FF4A3A4B211D78EFB0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

At 9:07 AM -0400 6/22/03, Simon St.Laurent wrote:


>At this point, I'm not convinced the unique names requirement was all
>that great an idea either.

Unique names make the API design a lot easier. Compare this to the 
case of child elements where the possibility of multiple child 
elements with the same name leads to ugliness like 
getFirstChildElement(String name). Worse yet, a lot of APIs 
incorrectly assume that there is only one element with a given name 
so instead you have things like getChildElement(String name) that can 
lose information. Not that we shouldn't be allowed to  have multiple 
child elements with the same name, but it does ad to the complexity 
of XML. I see no practical reason to saddle attributes with these 
issues too.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

• Follow-Ups:
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