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
