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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 14:30:28 -0600

Purely selfishly, I use the underscore (nods to Andrew) if I plan to  
use the name in microparsing.  Spaces are unreliable (people don't  
notice double spaces, single quotes disappear to aging eyes,  
underscores when doubled are human-eye noticeable.  A split function  
using an underscore is easy to see in the code that does the  
microparsing.

That said, I tend to camel_Case XML as a typing habit.  I would hazard  
a guess that camel_Case is a side effect of scanning lots of tags by  
eye and needing to sort out the sub-names inside the case.  I think  
that easier.  For the machine, someone else has to make the case for  
the Case.  I'm not sure it's useful in that regard.

In the system I'm working today, the locals giggled at the underscores  
in the file names claiming they were so "old school" and that "spaces  
are modern".  I let them have back the 3000+ files with an extra space  
in one of the file names.

Here's one for you, Roger:  do you think file names should preserve  
the names of the systems tracking the system in line before them or  
rename for the system the follows?  IOW, do we push names forward or  
track them backward?  I have my own story but I'd like to hear what  
you think?  As with granularity, there are practical reasons for  
choosing.

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>