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uw3c

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  1. I am not sure if you read my post but I corrected that already: meaning I understand attributes are meta information and not content. Seeing I have this insight, I don't understand why you replied about that.
  2. Hello everyone In the first bullet point of the chapter summary on HTML attributes (bottom of the page) it is stated: "All HTML elements can have attributes". Am I misunderstanding that by thinking empty elements can also have attributes? I tried to verify this by writing: (XHTML) <br title="test"/>or<br title="test"></br> or (standard HTML) <br title="test"> only to watch it not work as per my expectation because no tooltip is shown, however I hover over the document (code author: Mrw3c). Last I checked on the section about HTML elements, it does not say if an attribute is considered content or not. It only says the text between the start tag and the end tag is content and as far as I know, attributes are meta information, meaning they are not content. Of course, w3schools states an attribute 'provides extra information' so I could deduct that indeed means meta information. Aside from that, I checked the w3schools documentation on the <br> tag: and it says "The <br> tag is an empty tag which means that it has no end tag". Nonetheless, it does say that the <br> tag supports global attributes such as the 'title' attribute. However, as you can see above, I tried that but unfortunately it did not work for me. Am I missing something in my understanding? Thanks
  3. uw3c

    XML data representation

    But if you take information and you represent it by giving it a structure, that structure conveys new information to the brain. As the psychology of gestalt (confere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology) postulates, the brain sees everything in entities and not in seperate pieces. Structuring information is ultimately representing it. Well, that's what XML does, yes. I disagree that XML does not turn anything into information because our brain associates e.g. <age>26</age> 'age' with '26', therefore tying semantics to data. And after all, data given semantics becomes information (as you can see from the link below). Giving structure to data is what is turning data into information. In practical terms, I would agree. XML gives information a structure so that you can access it more easily, but I was more thinking in metaphysical and ontological terms.If information has no structure however, then it is no longer information. Then it is (raw) data and that is where the distinction of data versus information matters, especially in a developer's mindset. See here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110803173846AA6IEbh In conclusion, data has no structure. XML gives it a structure and therefore turns it into information for our brain that translates this data into information by associating the data with the structural patterns. It helps our brain because we think in patterns. Programmatically speaking, it is then easier to access this information because there are standardized tools for accessing it. I will do some more thinking on this.
  4. If I take data (1,2,3,a,b,c,..) and I put it in XML form (<a>, <b>, <c>,..), does that mean that data becomes information because of XML? Does XML turn data into information by representing it in tags?I am also reading here in a slideshow: "In JDOM, every XML tree is approached as a document even though the content has nothing to do with documents". I looked up the definition of 'document' on dictionary.com and it states that a document is meant as being informative. 'informative' means 'to convey information'. Then, if the purpose of XML is to represent data into information, why does the content of an XML tree supposedly not have anything to do with a document and therefore nothing to do with information? This is confusing. Perhaps the author of that slideshow was using different semantics than I have in my mind right now.Any thoughts on this?Thank you.
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