Re: xml:* attributes

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:14 AM, James Clark <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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