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I saw something particularly interesting on Robin COver's site: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2002-01-16-a.html "An initial Draft Federal XML Developer's Guide has been published for review by the U.S. Federal CIO Council XML Working Group .. designed to assist government activities in developing XML implementations in the short term, while lessons learned are collected. It provides general development guidance for the many XML initiatives currently taking place within US Departments and Agencies." The draft text is at http://xml.coverpages.org/CIO-Council-XML-DeveloperGuidanceVersion1.pdf The document is basically a "best practices" guide for XML developers, and interesting in that respect alone. For example it - Strongly favors W3C Recommendations, but allows use of draft specs and other organizations' specs if a justification can be made - More or less forbids use of specs that compete with W3C technical work. - Discourages use of proprietary extensions to specs - Mandates use of the ISO 11179 naming convention - Allows DTDs for document-centric work but notes a preference for W3C XSD - Suggests separating information modeling from schema design - Insists that schemas and stylesheets be commented - Suggests a "header" metadata section in schemas - Recommends that attributes be used only to define metadata applicable to the entire subtree of an element This only skims the surface of course; the document is 103 pages long. I'd definitely be interested in hearing others' opinions on these guidelines, perhaps using it to bootstrap the xml-dev Best Practices Guide we keep talking about doing Real Soon Now. They don't ask for free advice on these guidelines, but maybe somone on this list is involved. The only thing I really don't like in this document is that rather quaint belief that the W3C owns the One Ring to rule them all ... Maybe my hope that the ISO is resurrecting itself and will eventually debug and productize the prototypes that come out of W3C Labs is even more quaint, but I find it odd for the government to consider a vendor consortium's Recommendations as more "standard" than those of international standards bodies.
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