Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Instance Document Design

As discussed in Chapter 4, the place to start is how we want the instance document to look. The bullet items below outline the major decisions involved. In the next subsection we'll make the same decisions in regard to the file description documents that describe our legacy non-XML formats.

• Elements and Attributes: I use Elements only for application data, mainly because the general purpose utilities we're discussing are designed to handle a wide variety of logical documents. The legacy formats in and of themselves offer little basis for deciding what should be an Attribute instead of an Element. For example, when dealing with a generic CSV row all the columns have the same significance. Building in the capability to ...