Comment by bambax
5 months ago
> Elements are for data. Attributes are evil
This is like, your opinion, man... ;-) You can devise your schema any way you want. Attributes are great, and they exist in HTML in the form of datasets, which, as usual, are a poorly-specified and ill-designed rethinking of XML attributes
> Documents without a schema should not make your tools panic or complain
They don't. You absolutely don't need a schema. If you declare a schema, it should exist. If not, no problem?
No, the problem with attributes is that people consistently misuse them. So many things about XML break down when you make everything a self closing tag with 50 attributes. So many programmers just seem to say, "oh, it's shorter text so it must be inherently better" or "oh it's one-to-one so I should strictly avoid anything resembling a heirarchy."
Like I think this guy is mostly correct in identifying bad XML: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml
Though I don't necessarily agree with the "data format" framing. This idea that markup languages are not data formats seems confused.
> They don't. You absolutely don't need a schema. If you declare a schema, it should exist. If not, no problem?
I agree that they should not.
However, I have used many tools that puke when presented with XML fragments or XML with no schema.
Sometime attribute use goes too far such as when they contain comma separated lists of items.
Sure, but that's not the fault of the format itself, is it? You can write extremely long enumerations in any natural language -- that's the author's fault.