[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Id vs. ID in SAX

• From: Uche Ogbuji <uogbuji@o...>
• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2000 20:30:10 -0600

> I've been getting increasingly flustered about the constant use of the
> the initial capped "Id" to refer to an identification instead of the
> all-cap "ID". This occurs throughout the SAX APIs in both method
> arguments and method names. Somehow this just looks wrong to me. I know
> the DOM does it too, but I think they're wrong as well.
> 
> Since the word ID is capitalized in common usage, it should be
> capitalized in Java names as well. This is similar to how URL is
> captialized in class names like java.net.URL and method names like
> getURL() in the Java core library.
> 
> This is actually a pretty big change to suggest. Most of the offenders
> are method argument names that can be changed without affecting anyone.
> However, there are also a lot of method names like getPublicId()
> scattered throughout SAX2.
> 
> What do people think? Is anyone else having the immediate gut reaction
> that these names are misspelled that I get when I read the
> documentation?

I'm very late to this argument (just catching up again), but I was compelled 
to immediate and violent disagree.  I have always advocated treating acronyms 
and abbreviations as words for purposes of capitalization in code standards.

For instance, our internal standards demand the following naming patterns:

SaxToDomHandler

DeployNatoJstarsAndAwacs

and of course

GetObjectById

I find this far more readable than DeployNATOJSTARSAndAWACS and the like.

In fact, I have the opposite problem with the W3C DOM group: that they got 
"GetElementsById()" right but DOMImplementation wrong.

Regardless, I think we can all agree that consistency is important regardless 
of aesthetic preference.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Senior Software Engineer
uche.ogbuji@f...               (303)583-9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-9036
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python



***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Id vs. ID in SAX
    • From: Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@n...>

• Prev by Date: Re: SAX Namespaces? ContentHandlers? Jobs.
• Next by Date: Min Performance Testing made Easier
• Previous by thread: XSL and Namespace Question
• Next by thread: Re: Id vs. ID in SAX
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread