Re: property value clarification

At 9:50 AM -0400 10/30/98, Greg Stein wrote:
>A little clarification here. I knew this was a sticky issue and is
>obviously raising some good discussion, but my main question related to
>the properties associated with the property-name elements, rather than
>the internal markup.
>
>If you want to use properties INSIDE, then I'd think that is fine. The
>main question revolved around whether the attributes of a property-name
>element are considered part of the value that must be persisted.
>
><prop>
>  <propname>contents</propname>
></prop>
>
>We save all attributes on markup within the "contents", but what about
>attributes on the "propname" element?

This is fine. We can require that propname not have attributes with
impunity -- anyone who feels they really need them can add a dummy nested
element to hold all the required global properties they want. In theory, we
don't even have to handle the xml:lang attribute, for this reason, but that
seems to penalize internationalization in a very bad way.

On the other hand, if we allow one attribute, why not allow them all?

In any case, since we're only talking about the root element, this issue
doesn't seem to have very many implications at all. However, even an
arbitrary decision is better than undefined behavior, since there's no
advantage to allowing possible incompatibility here.

If servers vary in their behavior with regards to this, then some clients
are going to depend on that variation, and break when used with other
servers. This is bad, and I don't see any arguments that this level of
variation is necessary.

   -- David
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Friday, 30 October 1998 09:30:38 UTC