Re: Abbreviated Tag Names

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 04:38 PM 1/21/01 -0800, Don Park wrote:
>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.

RDDL's gotten me thinking again about dictionary resources, and I'm doing a
presentation on transformations next week.

It seems like there are a substantial number of cases where 1-1 equivalence
actually happens in the world - abbreviation and translation being the two
largest.  I'm pondering (haven't yet built) a thesaurus processor, which
lets you feed in a set of rules and specify which set applies, and then run
it over documents.

It does less than XSLT and carries less freight than XML Schema equivalence
classes, which seems like a good thing to me.  I suspect it won't be that
hard to implement as a SAX filter, XSLT transform, or DOM processor, though
I'm still getting started.

Dictionary files add more weight, of course, but there might be ways to get
around that for a lot of projects.

I wasn't planning on mentioning it until I had something to show, but since
you mentioned....

Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books