At 2009-01-26 13:01 +0000, nico_debeissat wrote:
>It is always a problem : you have to trim the text, test if it is
>empty, it is a lot verbose... I think that when you expect a value in
>a XML file, it should always be inside an attribute.
>If that is a text content of a web page, an article, I understand
>that, but for the rest, I think the main problem of XML specifications
>in general is that they use too many text nodes.
>For tomcat configuration of users, it is better done :
>
><user name="admin" password="pwd" roles="admin"/>
>
>Some of the XML expert people should publish a guide of good habits in
>order to specify XML, I did not find any when I was trying to make
>schemas.

Did you see: http://xml.coverpages.org/elementsAndAttrs.html

>What do you think about that ?

Personally, I coerce my content models to ensure that users put prose 
(human-oriented content) in text nodes and strings (machine-oriented 
content) in attributes.  Not least because I can perform spell-check 
on my text nodes and skip all characters in markup as not being spell-checked.

This rule of thumb has served me well since the SGML days.

There was a time when some prose text characters required markup 
(though I haven't seen this lately), and markup is allowed in element 
content but not attribute content.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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