Re: XMLCONF usage guidelines are flaw

[Larry Menten <lmenten@lucent.com>]

Scott,

I would contend that not using attributes requires even more state to
be retained
before you can do semantic processing.  For example, you can not 
identify the
instance of the element that is meant until you scan the children to
find the elements
that comprise the key.

And since the parser cannot enforce the uniqueness of these key fields
without
a schema, you are now forced to do an expensive schema-based validation
of the
document before you even see the elements, or you are required to
scan all of the children of the element to verify the uniqueness of the
key fields
before you can do any processing of the element.

Expensive.  Wasteful.  Unnecessary.

Larry



Scott Lawrence wrote:
> Larry Menten <lmenten@lucent.com> writes:
>
> > I have examined the guidelines provided in the
> > Enns XMLCONF draft and I believe they
> > impose to great a cost on the processing of the
> > XML configuration content.  In particular, the
> > statement "attributes should contain metadata
> > about the element, not true data."  I believe that this
> > is a misapplication of XML that results in a cumbersome
> > representation that is costly to process.  This in turn
> > results in greater development cost and greater cost
> > of device resource.
> >   
>
> Using attributes requires more state be kept in the parser prior to
> being able to do any semantic evaluation, making it more memory
> intensive to do incremental processing.  This is primarily because you
> can't know what the names are in an element start or empty element tag
> until you've reached the closing '>', because namespace attributes can
> change what the names mean.

-- 
Larry Menten               Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories
Phone: 908 582-4467        600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ  07974 USA