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An off-list discussion inspires me to ask for suggestions on how "best practices" or "effective design patterns" for XML might best be codified. Discussions such as the "Attributes v Elements" and "XML Schema: DO's and Don'ts" threads are very useful, as are documents such "Common XML" and sites such as http://www.xfront.com/BestPractices.html How can such resources best be coordinated, kept updated, and made findable by the people who need them most? More generally (mounting my favorite hobbyhorse), W3C specs are put together by geniuses in the lab, but we then need to figure out what really works in the field and how ordinary people can use it. There's a lot of knowledge generated by mailing lists such as this ... how do we (as a community) manage that knowledge so that it reflects the actual experience of users and is accessible by newbies? Some ideas ... A general XML "Best Practices" website/mailing list focussing on this? A network of weblogs where individuals can cull pointers to the most useful bits of information (in xml-dev and elsewhere) and comment on them? A more formal "knowledge base" (guinea pig for the Semantic Web advocates?) where assertions about XML best practices can be made, weighted, and queried? The way this traditionally worked is that the people who had some idea of how the "literature" in a field fit together wrote books, and the best selling overviews "won". Maybe this is a job for individual minds or small groups rather than a community project? ???
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