Re: Get rid of the leading hyphen!

In message <199702111554.PAA20960@curia.ucc.ie> [... Jon Bosak...] writes:
> > >We should get rid of the hyphen in front of XML in reserved names and
> > >attributes.
> > >
> > >"-XML" is ugly, it's hard to type, it looks dumb, and it doesn't
> > >really pollute the name space any less than any other reserved string.
> > >Reserve "XML" and be done with it.

Does this mean (as I infer and hope) that all XML-* (elements starting with
'XML-') are reserved?  If so, it should presumably be stated in the XML spec.
Otherwise the spec will need to list the (?5) reserved element types.  
Would it be a reportable error to have other tags starting with 'XML-'?

The reason I mention this is that it seems that a managed XML- namespace 
may be extremely useful.  I'm NOT making a proposal, but suggest the following
scenario.  We shall shortly create the primordial tag-soup where anything
goes, but it is possible that order may evolve out of chaos.  As an 
example, I expect lots of authors to create a <DATE> tag.  Its semantics
could be formalised (perhaps by using the ISO standard) and XML/W3C might
play a role in this.  Perhaps it could evolve through <XML-X-DATE> (by
analogy with unregistered MIME types) to <XML-DATE>.

When discussing how we add semantics to elements, one approach (where 
appropriate) is to develop a set of such information components.  These 
could be used in WF documents without the need for a DTD, or alternatively 
could be bolted into individual DTDs without needing to supply explicit 
semantics.

At this stage the question would be whether any/all 'XML-' strings other than
those in XML-LINK were reserved, and perhaps whether an XML-X- mechanism 
was allowed.

	P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust, (domestic net connection)
Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, Nottingham University, UK
http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~pazpmr/

Received on Wednesday, 12 February 1997 10:10:15 UTC