Re: Content v. attribute

Don Park (donpark@quake.net)
Mon, 26 Oct 1998 21:58:52 -0800


Paul,

>What does P.getAttribute( "B" ) return if there are three B s with four I
>s between them?

SInce it makes no sense in Java, null seems appropriate. What I proposed
makes no sense (except in ECMAScript where P.B is a collection and
P.B[index] returns the element) if the information is not unique or complex.

BTW, DTD designers seems to prefer using contents for flexibility and
attributes for brevity. I forgot to mention in my previous message that it
is awkward to access attributes stored as contents using DOM.
getElementsByTagName is a rather expensive operation and returns NodeList.

Best,

Don Park
Docuverse