When is an attribute an attribute?

[Murray Maloney]

There is no real "right" way to encode something 
like your example. Any of the examples that you
have offered is just as likely as the other, and
an application that works with any of them is just
as likely to succeed in meeting its objectives.

However, if you wanted to distinguish between a 
family and given name, and maybe add an honorific
or an accreditation, you might want to use an element
with subelements for the author. Using a comma in
the name requires a second-level parse. An advantage
of using nested subelements is that you can avoid 
a second level parse.

Otherwise, as I said, there is no "right" answer.


At 06:51 PM 4/6/98 -0400, Roy Tennant wrote:
>I've been trying to figure this out for a while with no success. It seems
>to me that there are several quite different ways one can encode
>information in XML. Are all of the following correct? When and why would
>you choose one over another? Does it matter? Thank you for your indulgence
>as I puzzle out what must surely be readily apparent to most of you.
>
>Example 1:
>---------
>
><BOOK TITLE="The Call of the Wild" AUTHOR="London, Jack"\>
>
>Example 2:
>---------
>
><BOOK AUTHOR="London, Jack">The Call of the Wild</BOOK>
>
>Example 3:
>---------
>
><BOOK>
>   <TITLE>The Call of the Wild</TITLE>
>   <AUTHOR>London, Jack</AUTHOR>
></BOOK>
>
>Thanks,
>Roy Tennant
>
>
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