xml-dev - Re: conventions for case of names?

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

"DuCharme, Robert" wrote:
 
> We're deciding on naming standards for a large project and I wanted to ask
> who has been involved with such decisions on projects or who knows of
> explicit standards.

I guess every company will have inhouse conventions, but I don't know if
anyone has ever come up with convincing arguments one way or another for
particular spelling conventions; just as with programming languages.

You might however detect that XML used functionally (e.g. XSLT) will
tend to have "-" while XML used descriptively (e.g. XML Schema) will
tend to use camelCase, in the W3C specs. (One could speculate that this
is the influence of TeX (i.e., literate programming), emacs and DSSSL on
the functional specs. This seems a good decision, from the point of view
of making these specs pallatable to existing text processing and
document processing people.)

When XML was being developed, I proposed that the various punctuation
marks available should be quaranteened with specific semantics: "_"
would be used in place of spaces, "." would be a class/container
operator, "-" would be a phrase joiner, and "::" might be used for
hierarchical names (following ISO 9070 rules).  One of the sample SGML
declarations I made had this.  But there was a feeling that such a rule
could not be made without compromising backwards-compatability with
existing DTDs (and with names taken from databases).   (An in the end,
the various ideas for hierarchical names reduced (degenerated) into
two-level formal public names using URIs: emerging as XML Namespaces.)

Rick Jelliffe

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