Re: [xml-dev] Engineering versus Science, Anecdote versus Evidence... [W

[Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

> Indeed it is.  However, at the mundane level of style guides, Google
> actually has a particularly fine style guide for the design of XML
> documents which they grossly ignored in this case.  Bad, bad Google.
>
> Disclaimer: I call it "particularly fine" because I wrote it, with
> contributions from lots of people who were also at Google at the time.
>
> http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xmlstyle.html

Point 5.1 is interesting:

"All elements MUST contain either nothing, character content, or child
elements.  Mixed content MUST NOT be used.  [Rationale: Many XML data
models don't handle mixed content properly, and its use makes the
element order-dependent.  As always, textual formats are not covered
by this rule.]"

I'm guessing you mean don't use mixed content for data centric xml?

Also 5.2

"XML elements that merely wrap repeating child elements SHOULD NOT be
used.  [Rationale: They are not used in Atom and add nothing.]"

They really are helpful  - I'm having to process xml like this at the
moment and it is a bit tedious, as typically the output will have some
form of wrapper.  For example given:

<item>a</item>
<item>b</item>

to output that as a html list:

<ul>
  <il>a</li>
  ...

you need to create the wrapper <ul> on the first occurrence of <item>,
then process the rest from there.

If there was an element <items> that merely wrapped the <item>s :)
then it would make life a bit easier.



-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com