Re: Are we losing out because of grammars?

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> That's IMHO more of an issue of schema design: Why introduce the "fname"
> term when "first-name" is perfectly acceptable. Perhaps if we did consult
> terminologies we could better re-use existing terms rather than continuously
> reinvent the wheel.

Yes, this what I meant.

The decision to use another term shouldn't be seen as a schema design
issue but as a XML vocabulary design and I am afraid that (over)using
schema datatypes might hide the issue.

Some best practices and designs seem to point in that direction and even
if they might be best practices for a schema design, they are IMHO, bad
practices for XML design.

> This is of course the reason that we provide 'well-known' natures.html and
> purposes.html in RDDL, not to prevent anyone from using other terms, but to
> enable good citizens to create easily understood documents.

That's why I have asked you if you could add the ones I had found
important :=) ...
 
> But as in documents designed purely for human consumption, people have a
> need to continuously invent new terms for otherwise common things. It is
> both a way for members of a group to speak precisely about common knowledge
> and as a barrier to entry for outsiders (for example medical terminology :-)

OTH, to take another example, it's not because there are online
translators available that I should send this email on xml-dev in
French...

Eric
 
> -Jonathan

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Eric van der Vlist       Dyomedea                    http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org         http://4xt.org              http://ducotede.com
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