RE: XML Enriched N-Triples (XENT)

> Just one observation -- all of the attempts to improve readability have
> used the same strategy: replacing *long* names by *short* names.
> That strategy takes into account the fact that humans can only absorb
> so much at one time, and *shorter is better*.

If you're not a Visual Basic expert then dbgrdQueryResult [1] will probably
be meaningless, whereas some sense can be made of the much longer
dataBoundGridQueryResult. The amount and type of meaning that is required is
also important - you probably don't/shouldn't need to know the type of the
object in practice, so queryResult is probably more appropriate. Yes, this
is shorter, but then so is qr or even x.

In general I suppose it depends a lot on how familiar the symbol is - the
XML acronym whizzes by in a way that Extensible Markup Language doesn't (I
even had to pause there to remember the spelling). The positional pattern of
most triples syntaxes is pretty immediately recognisable : blah blah blah,
<blah> <blah> "blah". or even blah(blah, blah). Tim Bray's RPV looked hard
work to me, in fact it seemed worse than RDF/XML.

Cheers,
Danny.


[1]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon98/htm
l/vbconobjectnamingconventions.asp
(not for those with sensitive dispositions)

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2003 17:56:43 UTC