• To: Ronald Kent Gibson <Kent.Gibson@i...>
• Subject: Re: writing good xml
• From: "Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)" <mbatsis@n...>
• Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:57:47 +0200
• Cc: "'xml-dev@l...'" <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <B153B9FFD8A5D411A1AE0050DA7C3AD03E6B3E@ICON041>
• Organization: Netsmart S.A., Greece
• References: <B153B9FFD8A5D411A1AE0050DA7C3AD03E6B3E@ICON041>
• Reply-to: mbatsis@n...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6)Gecko/20040113

Hi Ronald,

Ronald Kent Gibson wrote:
> Someone once told me that you should only used attributes when you know that
> you will never need another attribute. (Case 1)


True, meaning that, in general, it's ok to use attributes like

<foo bla="value"/>

if you are confident that no need to capture further information 
regarding 'value' will arise.

A simpler way of putting this is, only use attributes to capture atomic 
values and not anything more complex like sets or other datastructures 
(or anything you expect to become more complex in the future). This is a 
good practice that minimizes the amount of refactoring needed due to 
application changes.



> I would like the resulting XML to be easy to parse and to transform ( ie not
> tricky xpath or recursion required).

Hey, recursion is your friend!?

-- 
Manos Batsis

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http://www.netsmart.gr
mailto:mbatsisSPAM_TRAP@n...
tel:+302103240940
http://forte.netsmart.gr/foaf/manos_foaf.rdf

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    • From: Ronald Kent Gibson <Kent.Gibson@i...>

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