RFC: Attributes and XML-RPC

[Mark Nutter]

At 08:56 PM 09/22/99 +0200, Carsten Oberscheid wrote:
> >But when you're writing the DTD, how do you know what is "content" and 
> what
> >is "metadata"?  ...  It seems to me
> >that there isn't any inherent distinction, but rather an arbitrary
> >distinction is imposed by the designer at the time the DTD is written.
>
>I was talking about "document markup" with an emphasis on (text)
>*documents*, as in the fields of electronc publishing, hypertext
>applications etc. There you have a very clear distinction between content
>(what the document's original author wrote) and additional information
>about the document's structure and/or semantics, and, yes, perhaps about
>certain ways of processing (presentation, navigation etc.)

What about genealogies, commentaries, dictionaries, linguistic analyses, 
grammars, translations, and such?  It seems to me that there are lots of 
text documents in which the distinction between content and metadata is 
less than clear.  Even when the distinction is clear, it can still be 
problematic to try and map "metadata->attribute" and 
"content->child-element".  If you're marking up one of Shakespeare's plays, 
and you want to add footnotes explaining archaic English usages, your 
footnotes are conceptually metadata, but pragmatically speaking it could be 
awkward to represent each one as an attribute.

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Mark Nutter, <mnutter at fore.com>
Internet Applications Developer
FORE Systems
Some people are atheists 'til the day they die.


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