- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:18:42 -0800 (PST)
- To: Etan Wexler <ewexler@stickdog.com>
- Cc: "www-html@w3.org" <www-html@w3.org>
On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Etan Wexler wrote:
>
> An attribute is not content.
This is fundamentally untrue.
An attribute is just syntactic sugar for an unordered child element
containing only a text node.
The only difference between attributes and children nodes in XML is that
attributes are explicitly unordered, and cannot be nested, while children
nodes can include other elements nested within them.
It is possible to create variations on XML that do not use the attribute
syntax, for example:
<foo bar="baz" qux="quux">...children...</foo>
...could be written as (this isn't XML, this is another general markup
language that happens to look similar):
<foo>
<bar>baz</bar>
<qux>quux</qux>
<children>
...children
</children>
</foo>
In fact, the question about whether to put content in attributes or
elements during the development of markup languages is one of the most
hotly debated, and, ironically, one of the least important.
--
Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL
"meow" /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2003 17:18:08 UTC