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RE: Should one adopt the tag naming convention of anexisting X

• From: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>
• To: "'W. Hugh Chatfield'" <csi2000@urbanmarket.com>, <xml-dev@l...>, "'Costello, Roger L.'" <costello@m...>
• Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 18:16:23 -0600

" I have always found context and end users to be the driving force, 
when a "standard" DTD was not available."

Yes.  Given a local set of practices in layout, you can extract enough
information from the style name and text to build back up to richly tagged
information.  Again, the virtue of XML is what can be usefully done with a
handful of GUI and free code.  A fellow published the DocToXML code on a
site and it gave a good way to get a basic task done.  Take it as a starting
point and build to it.  Did that.  Easy.  Cheap.  Works.

I've been using this method and it works given basic XML utilities.  Do it
all on the desktop.  When at this chore, ignore the web. 

Let the browser be the browser.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: W. Hugh Chatfield [mailto:csi2000@urbanmarket.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2012 2:28 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org; Costello, Roger L.
Subject: Re:  Should one adopt the tag naming convention of
anexisting XMLvocabulary or create one's own tag naming convention?

What I know from my past projects is that the naming conventions depend 
a lot on what you are trying to model with the DTD, and the end users 
of your model.  (assuming DTD here - but could be schemas, etc. 
 these project were from way back). 

For example, the CALS DTD.  THe US CALS DTD was basically a model of 
the "documents" being produced.  In other words, they used text 
concepts like volume, chapter, section, para, table, etc. 

When I worked on the CALS DTD for Canada it was decided the DTD would 
be a model of "equipment" not "documents" - hence there were tags 
 introduced for concepts like assembly (recursive) and for each 
assembly there were parts list, trouble shooting tables, equipment 
description, repair instructions, etc.  Sure ultimately, when the 
content wound up as "text", it made sense to use textual tags - 
section, para, etc. - and there we could have adopted common tag names 
- but even these would have specific equipment tags in the mixed 
content sections.  Tables weren't columns and rows, they were 
symptoms, test procedure, repair procedure, etc. - but were still 
rendered as a table. 

When working with the Department of Justice - it was decide to use tag 
names that the authors of legislative text (lawyers and legal 
specialists) already understood and were in use from authoring all the 
way through parliament.  This was before any generic legislative DTDs 
hit the market.  We tried to minimize the disruption in the authoring 
process on the switch from a highly customized older version of 
Word-Perfect to SGML. 

So I have always found context and end users to be the driving force, 
when a "standard" DTD was not available.  Maybe if you are trying to 
decide a tag name from 3 different vocabularies, you would pick the one 
with the greatest degree of fit to your end user... whatever degree of 
fit might mean in your environment. 

Cheers....Hugh

UBL is in your future....  http://goUBL.com

On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 19:14:24 +0000, "Costello, Roger L." 
<costello@mitre.org> wrote:
Hi Folks,
>
> I am about to create an XML vocabulary. 
>
> My XML vocabulary will leverage (reuse) three existing, mature XML 
> vocabularies. 
>
> So my XML instances will consist of tags that I created and tags from 
> the existing, mature XML vocabularies. 
>
> For the tags that I create, what tag naming convention should I use? 
> Here are two possibilities:
>
> 1. I will create a my own tag naming convention, independent of the 
> XML vocabularies that I will use. 
>
> 2. I will adopt the tag naming convention of one of the XML 
> vocabularies that I will use. (Which one?)
>
> What do you recommend? What are the tradeoffs?
>
> /Roger
>  



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• References:
  • Re: Should one adopt the tag naming convention of anexisting XMLvocabulary or create one's own tag naming convention?
    • From: "=?utf-8?b?Vy4gSHVnaCBDaGF0ZmllbGQ=?=" <csi2000@urbanmarket.com>