Re: [xml-dev] Why is the file suffix of XML Schemas .xsd and not.xsd.xml

[Rhodri James <rhodri@kynesim.co.uk>]

On 03/10/2019 12:07, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> An XML Schema document is an XML document, so why isn't the file suffix of XML Schema documents .xsd.xml?
Because file extensions are not, by convention, structured.

Back in the mists of time, files weren't typed at all.  They had names 
and contents, and you just had to know what type of contents were in 
which file.  Since you had probably created all the files on the system 
and might well be able to remember what they were, this wasn't a problem.

Then CP/M came along with its 8.3 naming rule for files.  This was 
revolutionary (or annoying, depending on your point of view).  It wasn't 
the only system that arose -- Acorn's RISC OS for example has an 
entirely separate field in the file's meta information for type -- but 
it became the dominant one because MS-DOS was based on CP/M and took 
over the market.

The big advantage of file types, however implemented, is that you can 
associate actions with them.  On a command line, this is not much use, 
but on a desktop it's gold.  You can arrange for double-clicking a text 
file to start a text editor and load the file, or double-clicking an 
Excel spreadsheet file to do the same using Excel.  As a desktop 
manager, you want to do this as quickly and simply as you can, so mostly 
by accident we have ended up with the convention that the file extension 
is just the text from the *last* dot onwards.  Your whatever.xsd.xml.txt 
file would be interpreted as a text file, started up in a plain text 
editor, and so on.  That's probably not what you want.

If you want to persuade the world that everything from the first dot 
onwards should be the file extension, you are facing an uphill battle. 
Many existing file and directory names already contain dots, such as 
Linux libraries (version numbers) and Java modules (specialist 
structured names).  You might persuade the XML world, but that might 
actually work against XML usage in general!

--
Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd