Business Content Expressed as Elements
Following published guidelines within the XML standard and common practice, all application or business data within a QDoc is expressed as XML elements rather than attributes. Attributes are intended to represent metadata only—characteristics describing how the data in the XML document should be interpreted or processed, rather than application content. Moreover, the XML schema standard on which QAD depends for syntactic validation of QDocs provides much richer typing and extensibility features (for example, ability to inherit data type characteristics by extension or by restriction) for elements than for attributes.