[XML-SIG] XBEL DTD

[Greg Stein]

Marc van Grootel wrote:
> ...
> I would like to throw out owner and machine in favor of a generic htmlish
> meta tag.
> 
>   <info>
>     <meta name="owner" content="me">
>   </info>
> 
> If owner and/or machine name are needed you could claim a standard
> meta tag with owner, machine or whatever your application needs. This
> way all info could be processed by the same code.
>...

This is kind of silly. XML is intended to encode the "name" as the
actual tag. Why push this down another level? Using an "owner" tag, you
can extract this information directly from the parse tree. Using a
"meta" tag like above, now the software has to iterate through the meta
tags looking for the information.

XML is enough of an abstraction; you don't want to start creating
additional layers in there. The tendency should be towards additional
tags and less "control" type elements. It does not hurt anything to
specify an optional tag, yet it can make many things easier.

-g

--
Greg Stein (gstein@lyra.org)