RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC

[Erik James Freed]

My thinking is that it is considered harmful to have two ways of doing
such semantically equivalent things, because this can easily lead to more
complicated implementations
and more complicated interfaces than is optimal. This rule of course can be
immediately broken if there is some truly useful distinction between the two
(they are not truely equivalent). The case
Tim is making for breaking this rule is one of readability e.g. that
attributes are more readable for certain features. Presumably this
readability advantage would diminish and reverse where attributes are long
enough to really want to be on multiple lines. So you have a feature where
the lenght of the string representing the value determines an implementation
change (kind of fugly as data modeling goes). I can see either side, but I
think that
readability is a troublingly subjective metric. Another argument is that
this seemingly small semantic aliasing may cause more problems in the future
as new features are added. Note the effect on query languages for instance.
God knows they need all the help they can get to limit complexity.

I would conclude that attributes were a truly unfortunate decision, and we
will live to regret it more in the future, but does the impact of this
decision have enough of an force to reverse a long standing language
feature? I kind of doubt it, I bet that there is now enough cultural
momentum to prevent that.

erik

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk [mailto:owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
> David Brownell
> Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 9:40 AM
> To: xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC
>
>
> Tim Bray wrote:
> >
> > 	 From the programmer's point of view, there's
> > no difference in the degree-of-difficulty of extracting info
> from elements
> > and attributes.  And in the (large, important) subset of XML where the
> > information is created and handled directly by humans, I have observed
> > that people get a warm fuzzy glow from attributes and find XML
> more readable
> > when some stuff is in attributes.  So... why struggle?  -Tim
>
> Heck, if folk want XML without attributes, then I'd as soon just use
> LISP S-Expresssions ... and since folk seem to have chosen not to go
> that route, I'd say stick with the attributes!  ;-)
>
> - Dave
>
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