Topic: xml: how do you write it? (Page 1 of 1)

would you rather write:

<firstname>Mary</firstname>

or

<firstname value="Mary" />

Either way works, I'd use child elements though, like:

<person sex="female">

[b]<firstname>Mary</firstname>[/b]

<lasname>Johnson</lastname>

</person>

Here's what I grabbed from W3Schools:

quote:

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There are no rules about when to use attributes, and when to use child elements. My experience is that attributes are handy in HTML, but in XML you should try to avoid them. Use child elements if the information feels like data

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[This message has been edited by synax (edited 06-05-2002).]

No hard rule on this but for this kind of thing 99% of the time it would be the first.

The second example is for the use of field attributes. Not generally for data fields.



.:[ The Tao of Steve ]:.
Be Desireless
Be Excellent
Be Gone
...................................

interesting.
i always used the second version with attributes til now. hmmm.

they arent limited by any way, are they?

You can look at it this way:
If the value will be used by the software only (for parsing, conditions, identifier, cathegorizing...) it most probably is an attribute and belongs inside the container tag, if it will be used/presented to the end user, it's not.

Both ways work I suppose, but since XML is a language supposed to be easily read by both machines and humans, separation and clarity of the code is important.

As for limitations... Well, XML swallows almost anything as long as it is well formed. What attributes you are allowed to use you can define yourself in a DTD, that's where all the validation rules on what you can use for each tag comes from.
/Dan

{cell 260}
-{ a vibration is a movement that doesn't know which way to go }-

Coming to this a little late but if you are producing the XML to feed data to Flash (as I suspect you are) then I believe using attributes greatly speeds up the parsing of the data as it takes Flash longer to work with nodes.

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