[thelist] Address Book Markup Language - Address Books written in XML

[Lachlan Cannon]

Simon Willison wrote:
> Looks like an interesting project. Here are a few thoughts:
>
> 1. How about allowing multiple comments for each contact? "comments*"
> instead of "comments?"

Can you give me an example of when you wouldn't want to put all your
comments under the one tag?

> 2. You use a huge amount of elements with #PCDATA which could be replaced
> with attributes. Remember, many XML parsers handle attributes faster than
> #PCDATA so using them can give a good overall performance gain. For
> example, birthdate(month, date, year) could be better handled with:
>
> <!ELEMENT birthdate (date)>
> <!ELEMENT anniversary (date)>
> <!ELEMENT date EMPTY>
> <!ATTLIST date
>   month CDATA #REQUIRED
>   day CDATA #REQUIRED
>   year CDATA #REQUIRED
>  >
>
> Alternatively you could have the month/day/year attributes as part of the
> birthdate/anniversary elements themselves - I'm not sure what is considered
> best practise for that kind of thing.

Hmm... to make it easier, I've changed it to multiple date elements
coming from the dates element, each with those three attributes, and a
type attribute to define what type of date it is. I think that works
around that problem well enough, and it makes it more easily extensible
for other types of dates.

> 3. businesses could do with having optional addresses information

I've put down a single optional address element in businesses. My
original thinking was that this would be covered by the work address
element, but I realised that you might need to have the companies head
office as well. I don't think that other addresses for the company would
be relevant though, since they wouldn't affect the person which the
address book listing is about. Thoughts?

Thanks,
--
Lach
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E-mail: lach @ illuminosity.net
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