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RE: Effective XML

• To: "'Leigh Dodds'" <ldodds@i...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Effective XML
• From: Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@A...>
• Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 13:40:04 -0800

How about changing your third one to "Use SAX when efficiency matters" (to
suggest that using the DOM can be the right design choice in some
instances).

I very much like the first two. I really wish RDDL was more widely adopted.
I'm also inclined to add the following (though others may disagree with the
last 2):
  - Don't use XML documents as a database
  - Stick with UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings (and if you don't know what that
means, learn)
  - Use namespaces for modularity and extensibility
  - Be friendly to non-validating parsers -- don't rely upon PSVI constructs
(e.g. defaulted attributes, IDs) without prior knowledge of how the document
will be used 

I know the last one is probably controversial. I personally think that
parsing, validating, and transforming/filtering the infoset should be
explicitly separate processing layers, but I guess I can't change the world
on this one. At least, though, we should be able to say it is not a best
practice to bludgeon every user of your documents into relying upon DTD or
XML Schema validation to get the intended content of your document.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leigh Dodds [mailto:ldodds@i...]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 6:18 AM
> To: xml-dev
> Subject:  Effective XML
> 
> 
> During the discussion on pull-apis last month, James Clark 
> recommended the book 'Effective Java', prompting me to 
> add it to my reading list.
> 
> On scanning the introduction, I saw that the author (Joshua 
> Bloch) explained that he'd borrowed the concept from Effective 
> C++ which also sets out 50 odd language best practices.
> 
> It started me wondering whether there are 50 rules for 
> Effective XML?
> 
> I suspect that there are probably a great deal more than 50, 
> simply because the domain is getting so big. But I'm sure that 
> there are some good high-level guidelines which might be 
> grouped in categories.
> 
> A couple off the top of my head:
> 
> - Document your Namespaces using RDDL
> - Avoid using external entities when exchanging documents
> - Use SAX for efficiency
> 
> Anyone care to add some others?

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