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Re: Naming conventions for a sampling of W3C and ISO XMLvocabu

• From: cbullard@hiwaay.net
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:23:21 -0600

Dim memories are that a) Bosak argued for camel case and it was trendy  
at the time.  b) Don't remember but XSLT inherited from DSSSL work and  
that may be where that originates.  Check with James Clark.  c)   
Schematron is originally Rick Jeliffe's fine work.  He may have some  
insights.

Yes, naming conventions are useful but where work has different  
original sources and then get grandfathered it can be arduous to  
rework them and otherwise, it isn't the top priority in the insanely  
political and still technically complex work of spec baking.

As Michael hints at, time to approval is an issue.  The W3C was to be  
the ISO-replacement because it could get a spec done fast when doing  
things in "Internet Time" was trendy.   The results of that are mixed.  
  To come up to true international quality (world-class), processes  
have to slow down for QA and multiple implementations.  The claim that  
they will be overcome by events is overblown now that actual  
infrastructure development is mostly done for the current phase of web  
evolution.

We say we can clean up later.  Mostly we don't because any technology  
that is widely successful and fielded is hard to get out of the  
stickiness of deployment.  In this, the web has multiple meanings.

len


Quoting "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I am sampling some standard XML vocabularies to see what naming  
> convention they use. Below is what I've compiled thus far. What  
> naming convention do you use?
>
> 1. XML Schema: all elements and attributes are camel case. Examples:  
> maxOccurs, elementFormDefault, substitutionGroup.
>
> 2. XSLT: all elements and attributes are lower-case, dash-separated.  
> Examples: apply-templates, exclude-result-prefixes, analyze-string.
>
> 3. Schematron: most elements and attributes are a single, lower-case  
> word (e.g., assert, rule, pattern). There is an element and an  
> attribute with multiple words (value-of, is-a). There are two  
> elements that use camel case (queryBinding and defaultPhase).
>
> Notice that Schematron isn't consistent in its naming convention. Is  
> that a bad thing? Is it a good thing to have a consistent naming  
> convention?
>
> Why does XML Schema and XSLT have different naming conventions? They  
> are both W3C technologies. Does the W3C not have a policy on naming  
> markup?
>
> /Roger
>
>
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• References:
  • Naming conventions for a sampling of W3C and ISO XML vocabularies
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>