[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] SV: a useful naming convention
>As far as the internal syntax of a name is concerned, the only important >thing is to try and be consistent: use hyphens or underscores or camelCase, >but not all three interchangeably. >Michael Kay I was taught to avoid hypens and underscores due to potential problems with e.g. data-binding, though I can't provide concrete examples of such a problem. A myth or a reality? >- reduce keystrokes....I avoid camelhumps or capitals and tend to use >indenting as primary mechanism for making things easier to read >Jim Fuller Some of the element names I see are so long as to make them virtually unreadable without some method of distinguising e.g. an object term from a property in a name. Indenting has many merits, but relies on structural context to identify an element if it is used to e.g. remove part of an element name. In deeply nested structures it can also require a fair amount of horizontal scrolling.... >The main debate about naming is the scope of uniqueness of a name. Should >the title of a chapter have the same element name as the title of a section? >Michael Kay Good question. Title is a property of both document, chapter and section. It's also likely to have the same basic type (e.g. a string). It's also a property of a person's name (Mr, Ms, Sir), an entirely different thing. To what extent should context alone elucidate the meaning of the element name? Well it could be argued that a Title is a Title, whether it applies to a document or a section, and therefore should be non-unique within the scope of the entire document, but unique to each parent tag. But then you might need to rename Title under person name to maintain the difference. The schemas I work with are designed after the principle of explicit delineation, such that the element names end up as e.g. DocumentTitle ChapterTitle SectionTitle and PersonTitle Needless to say, this can end up creating some very long names (see above). It also becomes more difficult to work with generic handling of any Title element, as there are now three types of title used in respect to a document and its subsections. Length of element name is also one reason why some acronyms might be thought useful, especially with regard to e.g. organisation names. Apart from that, many acronyms are in such daily usage that they convej more meaning than the fully expanded version? I know what an ISBN number is, but I'm not altogether sure I know exactly what the S in that stands for.... >if wanting to delineate type, then use some sort of explicit schema >attribute to do this job Well XML Schemas are themselves XML documents, with the same (if not more complex) issues of readability. In fact it's XML Schemas I tend to be reading and wishing for a convention that would simplify things a little - especially (as Bryan mentioned) where an element may be referenced via an imported or included schema. James Walford
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|