RE: xml:* attributes

+100000

I will add my own

g) Unproven but suggestive.  I suggest that this will enable uXML documents to run on more "out of the box" implementations of XML* technology with minimum knowledge of the user required.    Ultimately I could see a uXML toolchain being developed but the road to there is using existing tools.   By simplifying uXML to the bare minimum the chances of existing tools "doing the right thing" out of the box with no or minimal configuration is highest.
Tools are what the user will ultimately see as the surface area, not specs.   Specs are critical but from my history ... the number of people who claim to "know XML" and have actually read the spec is a very small percent.    Similar with JSON actually ...
It Just Works.   In general, the casual user doesn't read specs ... unless something doesn't work.   They read tutorials, mini guilds, Dummies cheet sheets.    Then try it and if it works they stop there.   That to me is an important goal to strive for. "Just Make It work in my tool"




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From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche@ogbuji.net]
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 9:40 AM
To: public-microxml@w3.org
Subject: Re: xml:* attributes

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:14 AM, James Clark <jjc@jclark.com<mailto:jjc@jclark.com>> wrote:
After giving this a lot of thought, my preference is for A (no colons
in attribute names anywhere).

The following considerations have influenced me.

a) I want to minimize the things in MicroXML that make sense only if
you know the historical context of MicroXML. If somebody who knows
nothing about XML reads the MicroXML spec, I want their reaction to
be: this is a pretty reasonable way to do document markup.  Wherever
possible I want to eliminate things that would appear strange to
somebody with no XML background. To put it another way, I want
MicroXML not just to be simpler than XML but less ugly (more beautiful
would be going too far).  In my view allowing an "xml:" prefix on
attributes increases the ugliness of the language.

Thanks for the careful tabulation of considered arguments.  In a strange way, this one above is the one I find most persuasive.  Probably that's what some of the opponents of A-prime have been getting at, but it helps to have that first sentence so clear, and I think it's strong enough that we should consider adding it as a goal.  Of course such a goal might have implications on other matters, such as PIs, and it certainly would help guard against having our data model ape any of the outlandish artefacts to be found in various XML data models.  Seems like a net win to me.

For my part I'll have to think a bit more before moving my +0 for option A to +1, but I wanted to acknowledge these strong arguments.


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