Re: [xml-dev] Fixing what's broke

[Chris Burdess <dog@bluezoo.org>]

Pete Cordell wrote:
> When I was first introduced to XML, very much with a data-oriented hat on where you have lots of small values, my initial response to seeing something like:
> 
> <trajectory:initialVelocityVarianceCoefficient>1</trajectory:initialVelocityVarianceCoefficient>
> 
> was "are you kidding?  Next...".

This is contrived, however. I have no idea what the ordinary usage term would be for this *in the pertinent domain*, however let us suppose that it is "IVVC". Note that abbreviating to an acronym here doesn't take away any of the readability or third-party semantics here, since there is very little of either in the first place (I'm not a physicist and I have no idea what "initial velocity variance coefficient" actually means, and I doubt many others do either). The point is that in the domain identified by the schema, workers in that field will have a very clear idea of what "IVVC" means, especially since it is nicely commented in the schema. It's the *normal case* for people to refer to verbosely named domain artifacts using acronyms. Likewise, we don't choose excessively verbose namespace prefixes since they're just a prefix and all we really need to do is disambiguate them from other namespace prefixes in the document. So let's choose a rather more reasonable prefix "t" for the trajectory schema. This results in something like

<doc xmlns:t='http://weaponsofmassdestruction.com/missiles/trajectory'>
 ...
 <t:ivvc>1</t:ivvc>

You see this all the time, it works and I don't see that there's anything broken about it.