SISR Recommendation: _value and _attributes

Hello voice,

I have a question regarding an obscure (to me) sentence related to EMMA serialization.


At section 7.2, it is written:
* The value of "_value" is treated as character data content of the containing object
* or the value of an attribute if the containing object is a child of _attributes.

Since there is an "or" in this pretty long sentence, I will decompose it into two, yielding:
* The value of "_value" is treated as character data content of the containing object if the
*   containing object is not a child of "_attributes".
* The value of "_value" is treated as the value of an attribute if the containing object is
*  a child of "_attributes".

The first half is pretty straightforward.
E.g. this leads to the following ECMA object:
* {x:{_value:"A B C"}}
being EMMA-serialized as:
* <x>A B C</x>


But I have trouble with the second half.
Consider the following ECMA object:
* {x:{_attributes:{at1:{_value:"A B C"}}}}
The "_value" field is contained in an object (which has property "at1") which is itself a
child of "_attributes". Hence, according to the standard, this value field is supposed to
be the value of the attribute itself (here the object that has property "at1").
Hence, its EMMA-serialization should be:
* <x at1="A B C"></x>

Am I right, or did I screw up somewhere?


But then, if I am right, why bother with the superfluous "_value" stage, since the following,
much simpler, ECMA object would give the exact same EMMA-serialization?:
* {x:{_attributes:{at1:"A B C"}}}

One may argue that the object under "_attributes" may be arbitrarily complex, having
many other useless (in this particular usage) attributes, as for example:
* {x:{_attributes:{at1:{_value:"A B C", some_attrib:XXX}}}}

But it would then be straightforward to extract just the sub-object rooted at "_value" in
the SISR tag that assigns "at1", rather than resorting to a somewhat strange (sub-)rule
of the standard...


Can someone enlighten me?


In any case, I think that more examples are needed in chapter 7 to better illustrate how
EMMA-serialization works.


Regards.

--Serge Le Huitouze


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Received on Friday, 2 November 2007 15:03:22 UTC