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Toni Uusitalo wrote: > But I was shocked when I started browsing through RDF syntax spec > http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-rdf-syntax-grammar-20030905/ and came to > 2.5 Property Attributes where it says: "When a property element's > content is string literal, it may be possible to use it as an XML > attribute on the containing node element. This can be done for > multiple properties on the same node element only if the property > element name is not repeated "... > > compared to section 2.4 Empty Property Elements' Example 5 what's > gained with this "abbreviation" but maybe that "the most horrible > markup usage award" or something?! > It seems that putting literal values into an attribute was motivated by wanting ordinary browsers not to display them - browsers will normally display element content even for unknown element types, but will ignore unknown attributes. So if you wanted to embed rdf data into a web page and not have it displayed (so as not to confuse a humna reader), attributes are a convenient way to do so. As David Megginson said - "... RDF's flexible syntax is well-designed for embedding in Web pages, but unfortunately, it turns out that almost no one wants to do that. ... As a result, it might be fair to conclude that RDF's syntactic flexibility was a kind of premature optimization, a lot of work to accomodate premature requirements." Cheers, Tom P
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