On Fri, 2025-05-02 at 12:07 +0000, Michael B Allen ioplex@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

<address
CB  street="123 Main St"
CB  city="Townville"
CB  state="PA"/>

> A good rule of thumb for document-oriented information in XML is
that anything user-facing should be in text content, and attributes
are for "properties' of that information. This was also suggested in
the SGML standard and amplified i think in the SGML Handbook.

Let's suppose you have a town on the border between Germany and
Poland, and you need to give both names for it in the address,
marking each with its language using xml:lang. You cannot do that
with attributes.

I once lived at '103 White Village, 2-20-6 Kasugachou' and 'C#BBC#BB/C#BB$C#BBC#BB
C#BB,C#BBC#BB8103 C&BB%C&BB%C'BB:2-20-6' (and 'C&BB%C&BB%C'BB:2-20-6-103'), IIRC.

Around that time, I wrote a contact database application for an importer
of Danish furniture.  Danish (and German and Swedish) addresses did have
some bits that paralleled bits in Japanese addresses, but the sequences
of all the bits in the different addresses was very different, quite
apart from the variations in Japanese addresses. [1] (Not to mention the
'C#BB' yCB+bin mark before the postal code in Japanese addresses.)  Working
from marked-up parts of textual content would have been so much easier
than reconstituting international addresses from database fields.

Tony Graham.
--
Senior Architect
XML Division
Antenna House, Inc.
----
Skerries, Ireland
tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx