HTTP Vocab, header property naming

Looking at the naming of the header properties, it seems to me that
while e.g. "link" is the most concise local name for that property,
and the machine can tell it's a subPropertyOf http:header, it would be
clearer for the human reader were its name to make clear that it was a
header, i.e. something like "link-header".

Another (considerably less significant) reason this may be worth
considering is that it may be desirable to use some of the header
terms in a future version of the schema for non-header purposes:
"public", "title", "position"... there are a lot of words with a
meaning outside of the header context.

I ran into the question in a practical context, playing with the
vocabulary in Jena, there's a snag when using the schemagen tool [1]
to generate a Java representation of the schema - two of the generated
property names conflicted with Java keywords: if & public. I certainly
don't think this inconvenience in itself is adequate justification for
changing the vocab, but the general principle of favouring
self-explanatory names could well be.

See also: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MeaningfulName

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://jena.sourceforge.net/how-to/schemagen.html

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Tuesday, 26 December 2006 11:59:27 UTC