A practical question about attributes

[Murray Maloney]

A practical answer.

Use attributes where you can and it suits you to do so.

Don't use attributes if you are concerned that you 
may want to use structured values in a later version.
Don't use attributes if you need to allow element markup
within the value for any reason.

At 02:38 PM 1/12/99 -0500, Jeffrey E. Sussna wrote:
>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
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Murray Maloney, Esq.          Phone: (905) 509-9120
Muzmo Communication Inc.      Fax:   (905) 509-8637
671 Cowan Circle              Email: murray at muzmo.com
Pickering, Ontario 		Email: murray at yuri.org
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