From: Benjamin Grosof (bgrosof@mit.edu)
Date: 06/25/04
Hi Peter and all, At 06:35 PM 6/25/2004 -0400, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote: >From: Benjamin Grosof <bgrosof@mit.edu> >Subject: RE: XML syntax for SWRL >Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:07:26 -0400 > > > Hi Pat and all, > > > > Specifically, a good reason to minimize use of attributes is that elements > > -- as opposed to attributes -- are more directly extensible in that their > > content can be elaborated to include further finer-grain elements (i.e., > > tags/markup). > > > > Benjamin > >This might be a good reason in some cases, but I don't see how it helps at >all for names of variables. I don't think variable names is one of the places where it's most crucial to be extensible. I was addressing the general point. That said... Wrt names, more generally (e.g., predicate names), suppose one decided later to have multiple parts/aspects to the name, e.g., an additional prefix name cf. namespaces or Prolog modules, or local name and global name, etc. It's easy to make a name an element (instead of an attribute) in the design, so why not; to do so preserves flexibility at little or no cost. Probably the most major convenience of making something an attribute (vs. element) is that one can in XML specify a default value for an attribute, but that's not really useful for variable names, or for names more generally. As go names in general, why not be uniform in the design and treat variable names in a similar fashion. >Is there any non-dart-board rationale here? > >peter Benjamin P.S. Personally I don't play darts much, but sometimes agree to play it to get on well with others ;-) ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Prof. Benjamin Grosof Web Technologies for E-Commerce, Business Policies, E-Contracting, Rules, XML, Agents, Semantic Web Services MIT Sloan School of Management, Information Technology group http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof or http://www.mit.edu/~bgrosof
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