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Re: a useful naming convention

• To: Bryan Rasmussen <bry@i...>
• Subject: Re: a useful naming convention
• From: James Fuller <jim.fuller@r...>
• Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:19:39 +0200
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <1122968288.42ef22e062711@h...>
• Organization: Webcomposite
• References: <1122968288.42ef22e062711@h...>
• Reply-to: jim.fuller@r...
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (Macintosh/20050716)

Bryan Rasmussen wrote:

>However reading the KML (Keyhole Markup Language) spec I came across this:
>
>There are two basic types of KML tags: simple and complex. Complex tags are
>easily identified by an initial upper case letter, while simple tags use all
>lower case. Complex tags can function as Parent Tags to both complex and simple
>tags, while simple tags are children only and can contain no other tags.
>  
>
this is maybe hard to maintain over time...and realistically this
information should be conveyed through relation to a schema (IMHO)

I would advocate;

- make clear and semantically correct element/attributes names,
obscuring this with acronyms or with some code convention is reducing
the value of marking up structure, likewise embedding such a convention
will be hard to maintain

- if wanting to delineate type, then use some sort of explicit schema
attribute to do this job

- reuse common attribute names (e.g. id, name, description) where
possible, I find that after designing a few xml markup languages that
after awhile all my attributes tend to come from a group of 10-15 or so
common attributes...seems to scan better once I have established this

- reduce keystrokes....I avoid camelhumps or capitals and tend to use
indenting as primary mechanism for making things easier to read

other then that, multiple namespaces tend to cause a lot of readability
issues...esp the decision of what is default namespace e.g. xmlns=""
versus prefixed namespaces....I am trending over using XHTML as my
ultimate always default namespace, as I reuse it a lot for documentation
these days.

gl, Jim Fuller

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