Comment by somat

Attributes exist due to it's origin as a markup language. XML is actually (big surprise) a pretty good markup language. Where the tags are sort of like function calls and the attributes are args. With little to no information to be gleaned out of the text. The big sin was to say "hey the tooling is getting pretty good for for these sgml like markup languages. Lets use it as a structured data interchange format. It's almost the same thing". Now all the data is in the text and the attributes are not just superfluous but actively harmful as there is a weird extra data axis that people will aggressively use.