At 03:18 PM 10/24/2003, David wrote:
> But why are you packing information into the element name anyway? That's
> what attributes are for.
perhaps but it is common all the same,
(x)html: h1 h2 h3 h4 h5
xmlspec: div1 div2 div3 div4
Common, but archaic! XML Spec probably lifts this from TEI (P3 finalized
1994); XHTML inherits it ultimately from IBM's GML (see
http://www.romankoch.ch/capslock/minigml.htm for something about this).
These were systems that could not presume that element sub-classification
by parentage (or even by attributes) would be at all easy in the processing
layer. Of course, in XSLT this is a piece of cake.
What exactly does this fixed enumeration help with? I've heard it's nice if
you're doing markup-wrangling in an editor that doesn't know how to deal
with XML syntax -- and that may be so, though somehow many of us manage
without -- but you pay an awfully high price for this in terms of
flexibility, on several layers (user interfaces, stylesheets,
complexity/adaptability of models).
Just my $0.02 worth, being spilled here on a non-XSL issue. :->
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
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