Abbreviated Tag Names

[Don Park <donpark@docuverse.com>]

Hello fellas,

I have been quite for a long time because a) I didn't have anything
interesting to contribute, and b) I was busy on mCommerce projects.
One interesting issue came up in my projects which I felt merits
some discussion on XML-DEV: verbose tag names and limited bandwidth.

There seems to be an on-going trend toward verbose tag names toward
which I have no opinion for its impact on mCommerce XML applications.
mCommerce technologies of today and near future are more likely than
not to impose severe constraint on bandwidth which conflicts with the
trend toward verbosity.

<flammable>
My opinion is that this condition will last for two to four more years
because expanded bandwidth of 2.5G and 3G will be offset more or less
by increased demands to erase any gain.  Wireless communication cost
will also not come down significantly to void impact of verbose data
formats because 3G service providers will be buried in debt.
</flammable>

New emerging standards such as XML-DSIG are useful in mCommerce, but
their verbosity reduces their applicability.  WAP, for example, limits
the size of WAP page to 800 - 1200 bytes which forbades use of verbose
standards like XML-DSIG.  It is also not possible to introduce compress-
ion into WAP at this time.

So, I have been thinking about abbreviated tag names and wanted your
thoughts on the subject.  There are many aspects to this issue:

1) should schemas be expanded or an alternate version be used?
2) should a new namespace be defined or old namespace be reused?
3) what role does RDDL play?
4) should there be a dynamic abbreviation mechanism? [no, imho]
5) how should abbreviated version of existing standards be created?
6) should there be standard rules for abbreviating tag names?

Obviously, this is not a complete list but should be enough to get the
discussion going.

Best,

Don Park
Docuverse