#2 Re: [SML] Whether to support Attribute or not?

Rick Jelliffe ricko at allette.com.au
Sat Nov 27 06:34:29 GMT 1999


 From: Don Park <donpark at docuverse.com> 

>I believe it is now time to address the question of
>whether Attribute should be supported in SML or not.
 
Since you are not asking for use-cases, the only logic
driving SML is reductionism. The result can only
be a language with 1 encoding and 1 tag and the 
minimum repertoire for names.

SML = (data | "<" ASCII* ">" SML "<" ASCII* ">"  )*

Given this, discussion seems utterly futile.

If people are serious, they should first establish some use-cases
of where XML fails.  This will also bring out the ramifications
of simplicification.

In any case, it seems to me that reductionism and anti-reductionism
are often character traits rather than technical positions capable
of being debated. A reductionist will say "if attributes do not mean
something they mean nothing" while an anti-reductionist might 
respond "it is a DTD/Schema function to allocate the particular
roles attributes/elements according to the methodology of the
DTD/schema designer: it is a source of richness for there to be
a syntactic disrinction which is methodogical neutral and available."


Rick Jelliffe


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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe 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)





More information about the Xml-dev mailing list