/ Yann Dirson <ydir...@fr.alcove.com> was heard to say: | In other words, I was thinking of extending the syntax of attributes | so that we could write: | | <article | <class>whitepaper</>

I've seen this suggested elsewhere recently. Specifically, that we could introduce a new syntax using some prefix character for "attribute elements". That you'd make

<article class="whitepaper">

the same as

<article> <_class>whitepaper</_class>

(If you selected "_" as the prefix character.)

While this would solve the problem from a purely pragmatic point of view, I'm not sure I like what it does to the XML data model and the complexity of applications.

| > <xh:p xmlns:xh="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">...</xh:p> | > | > If you did that, and gave xmlns: attributes special treatment so that | > they didn't have to be declared (because they aren't really | > attributes), you'd be in pretty good shape. | | But maybe there is a fundamental problem here, in that something that | isn't really an attribute should not use attribute syntax...

Yeah, I would have preferred processing instructions to magic attributes, but that's not the way the Namespaces Recommendation turned out.

Be seeing you, norm