----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Croft" jrc@ANBG.GOV.AU To: TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2001 8:30 AM Subject: Re: Challenge 1

| Kevin wrote: | >I've taken the route of marking up a textual description, using a minimum of | >tags. It seems to me that a description comprises a series of features with | >values. I've used mixed markup because I wanted to have the mimimum | >tagging and make maximum use of the text. | | Although XML allows mixed content such as Kevin's: | <Feature><Name>spines</Name>, not developing at each node, | <Feature Name="Length" MinValue="0">to c. | <MaxValue>1</MaxValue><Units>cm</Units> long</Feature> | </Feature> | and such a document can be validated against a schema, apart from being | untidy and inelegant, mixed content can pose certain problems when | attempted to be loaded into a relational database; this is probably not | going to impress people like Gregor. | | Can we agree that although mixed content XML is quite allowable, we are | going to try and avoid it in the SDD context?

Hey, who said we should aim to make life easier for Gregor? I regard it as a life ambition to make things harder for software developers, especially those who insist on cramming mother nature kicking and screaming into a database!

The mixed content of my suggestion is the thing I worry about most. But if there are advantages to mixed content (and it seems to me there are) then I think these should be weighed against the difficulty of dealing with it. Once we have more alternate solutions to challenge 1 we can deal with the advantages/disadvantages of particular solutions. I wouldn't like to preclude mixed content at this early stage - let's knock it on the head a bit further down the track.

Cheers - k