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- From: hpyle@agora.co.uk
- To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
- Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 07:37:43 +0000
Tyler wrote,
> If XML is ever going to be editable by an average
> internet user for some common tasks, meaningful prefixes do matter.
Can I ask for some "average user" stuff here? Now that the namespace
arguments have been rounded up a few times.
Although James Clarks' page does explain the state of affairs very clearly,
it's still talking to the wrong people. What I & my other
average-developer colleagues need is more like a "cookbook". Not the
intricacies of why flour plus butter behave so strangely; we need to know
how to roll the pastry out.
Current interest in XML - in the absence of many standardised industry DTDs
- means there's a pressing need to explain how to design sensible XML
structures. Whilst there are plenty of XML examples appearing on the Web,
few of them are well-designed (my pet peeve: people coding a date as
"2/21/99"). Namespaces seem to be an essential solution to two problems
encountered when designing XML stuctures:
- how can I distinguish my tags from everyone else's, to avoid confusion
(eg: "<my:pastry/>");
- how can I use a common repository of meaningful tags at the same time
(eg: "<frozen:pastry><my:sauce
iso:litres_quantity="0.5"/></frozen:pastry>")
With a few examples. Finally, we need directions to the local pizza
house...
-Hugh
agora
hpyle@agora.co.uk
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