A practical question about attributes

[Jeffrey E. Sussna]

Folks,

Having started a heavily philosophical thread about coherent standards, I want to ask a much more practical question. I am designing an XML schema for use in an environment that is extremely bandwidth sensitive. I can gain significant size reductions by representing things as attributes rather than sub-elements. Here is an example:

<session><id>25</id><type>Q</type><num>15</num></session>

57  bytes

as opposed to

<session id="25" type="Q" num="15"/>

36 bytes

Here's the question: does anyone know of any gotchas in using attributes instead of elements? Parsing issues, etc.?

TIA,
Jeff

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kuantech, Inc.                            http://www.kuantech.com
Jeffrey E. Sussna, Principal                     jes at kuantech.com

Distributed Content Architectures for Dynamic Online Applications
-----------------------------------------------------------------


xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)