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RE: Create XML

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Create XML
• From: Doug Rudder <drudder@d...>
• Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:46:30 -0500

In addition to Rick's technical comments (taking off my DTD/schema developer
hat and putting on my technical writing instructor hat), in many reference
and/or technical  materials consistent ordering of content is important for
readability and usability of the content. I view an ordered DTD as a means
of promoting good authoring in many cases. This is not always true; a lot
depends on your specific use case. It does become a judgement call.

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@a...]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 11:27 PM
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Create XML


From: "Robert DiFalco" <rdifalco@t...>

> Of course, this isn't a big deal if my program is producing and
> consuming the XML. However, if I am consuming a document that a user
> produced, why should I force them to put FirstName, LastName, and
> Occupation into a particular order? A Person is still a Person if they
> appear as LastName, Occupation, and FirstName.
 
When thinking about XML in general, keep in mind that one popular
method of processing XML, especially for very large documents
or for very small documents, is to parse the document not into a 
tree or database tables but into a stream of events.  

For this kind of streaming processing, you don't have random access.
So the more that the incoming data events are in the typical sequence
that they will be used, the less that a programmer has to divert the
events to a temporary store for later use. 

The best practise for XML documents that may be processed by
streaming applications is to utilize document order as much as possible,
as the primary technique for reducing workload.  

In particular, what needs to be avoided is lookahead.  Decisions by the
notational users of the document, as far as they can be modelled ahead
of time, should not need to require information later in a document
to make decisions early. 

Examples of this might include:
 - having names in order (Robert's question);
 - putting footnotes at the start of a section or inline rather than at the
    end (it seems counter-intuitive);
 - having a <constants> section at the head of a document for 
   strings that will be used throughout the document, for consistancy;
  -embedding information sourced from databases that only appears once 
   inline, in the position it is expected, rather than using some kind of 
    reference to a later (or even earlier) element.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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