xml-dev - Re: Id vs. ID in SAX

[Uche Ogbuji <uogbuji@ogbuji.net>]

> I've been getting increasingly flustered about the constant use of the
> the initial capped "Id" to refer to an identification instead of the
> all-cap "ID". This occurs throughout the SAX APIs in both method
> arguments and method names. Somehow this just looks wrong to me. I know
> the DOM does it too, but I think they're wrong as well.
> 
> Since the word ID is capitalized in common usage, it should be
> capitalized in Java names as well. This is similar to how URL is
> captialized in class names like java.net.URL and method names like
> getURL() in the Java core library.
> 
> This is actually a pretty big change to suggest. Most of the offenders
> are method argument names that can be changed without affecting anyone.
> However, there are also a lot of method names like getPublicId()
> scattered throughout SAX2.
> 
> What do people think? Is anyone else having the immediate gut reaction
> that these names are misspelled that I get when I read the
> documentation?

I'm very late to this argument (just catching up again), but I was compelled 
to immediate and violent disagree.  I have always advocated treating acronyms 
and abbreviations as words for purposes of capitalization in code standards.

For instance, our internal standards demand the following naming patterns:

SaxToDomHandler

DeployNatoJstarsAndAwacs

and of course

GetObjectById

I find this far more readable than DeployNATOJSTARSAndAWACS and the like.

In fact, I have the opposite problem with the W3C DOM group: that they got 
"GetElementsById()" right but DOMImplementation wrong.

Regardless, I think we can all agree that consistency is important regardless 
of aesthetic preference.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Senior Software Engineer
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               (303)583-9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-9036
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python



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