RE: ISSUE-10: Mappings - proposed text

I think we have come to the conclusion that the most stringent
restriction is suitable for the Basic Patterns doc and that any other
valid ncname will be an advanced pattern.  As per Peter and Pauls
exchange the following is the bare pattern:

***
//xs:schema//@name values which conform to the following
pattern are "Basic":

  identifier  ::=  (letter|"_") (letter | digit | "_"){0,30}
  letter ::= ("a".."z") | ("A".."Z")
  digit ::= "0".."9"

Any other @name is marked as "Advanced".
***

I have slightly modified my orginal text below which we can now relegate
to whatever supporting documentation we choose to produce (or not).

Mappings Rationale.

The naming of element and type names remains a problematic area for
databinding tools. As the fundamental building blocks of an xml
document, tools *should* be able to support *any* valid XML element
name. This is still not the case however.

Historically, early versions of tools would not cope with the more
unusual characters available to the schema author, and these tools would
refuse to generate code. In all modern tools we have experience of there
is now excellent coverage of xml element names in so far as databinding
tools will generate the necessary serialisation/deserialisation code.
That this remains a problem area is to do with the mapping of valid xml
names to programming language specific environments often resulting in
'unpalatable' translations.

In many tools (but not all) it is possible to manually map the names to
something that is more acceptable to the developers but it must be
emphasised this is a manual step and will be very much dependent on the
specific programming language being used.

We have stopped short of giving language specific guidelines in this
basic patterns document because our aim is to provide generic guidance
to the schema author on what will work well. Our approach in this area
is that for ultimate interoperability element and type names should only

be constructed using aplphanumeric US ASCII and the "_" (underscore.

Where any characters other than these are 
used in a schema document the basic patterns validation rules will
generate a
message to warn the schema author of the potential problem:

Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2006 14:05:00 UTC