Re: [security-services] Why use name-value pairs for modeling attributes?

[Thanks Prateek, I feared you forgot me! <smile/> Also, I fear this message 
will be bounced by Oasis, so I'm cc:ing the w3c archive...]

On Monday 16 September 2002 09:51 am, Eve L. Maler wrote:
> (Note that the first example below should look more like this:
> <Attribute
>    AttributeNamespace="http://www.finance.org/V1"
>    AttributeName="CreditRating">
>    <AttributeValue>Good</AttributeValue>
> </Attribute>

Right, this struck me as very odd because there's no "normal" Infoset item 
for this information, the namespace declaration is verbose (though I'm glad 
you didn't stick only a prefix in there!), it's difficult to write a schema 
to validate it, and  there's no other parameters that I can associate with 
it. If it was XML, I could have a nested/parameterized structure, validate 
it, extend it, query it with XPath or forthcoming XQuery, etc. Now that I 
understand the way in which you are attempting to query it I see the 
motivation at least...

> There are a number of other ways we could have done it; one would be (a
> well-formed version of) the one apparently suggested by Joseph:
>
> <finance:CreditRating
>    xmlns:finance="http://www.finance.org/V1">
> Good
> </finance:CreditRating>
>
> I don't know if we really considered this option seriously.

Yep! I can then get at it with XPath or XSLT, don't need a special query 
thingy.

> We should probably consider what our true stance is on "QNames in
> content", since currently we're inconsistent and this doesn't offer a
> lot of guidance as to future design.

I'd avoid it if I could. (I have in the specs I've authored, and I've 
recommended it to others with mixed success and in the end it will be their 
headache...)