Re: [chairs] Updated Naming Guidelines for review and discussion

[Matthew MacKenzie <mattm@adobe.com>]

Bill (& TAB):

It is my opinion that the file naming guidelines are going a bit too 
far.  The filenames will in many cases be ridiculously long which in 
turn means that they will not be very usable.  We might as well just 
assign UUIDs to documents when the filenames get to be this long.

It seems to me that the TAB's goal is to embed document metadata into 
the filename.  Applying metadata to artifacts is an honorable goal, but 
is not appropriate for a file name.  Documents typically have some 
other way of asserting metadata about themselves - PDF uses XMP 
(basically, embedded RDF), MSWord has its own properties interface, XML 
Schemas have a self documentation capability, etc.  OASIS has deployed 
an ebXML Registry, which is very capable of managing document metadata 
externally from document content.

I think that the TAB would be much better off focusing on normalizing 
the way we, as a consortia, structure/author and publish documents and 
assign metadata to them.  The W3C model is good, notice how everything 
there is well organized, and epic filenames are rather rare?

Regards,

Matthew MacKenzie
Sr. Architect, Intelligent Documents
Adobe Systems

> From: William Cox <wtcox@comcast.net>
> Date: October 5, 2004 9:27:43 PM EDT
> To: OASIS Chairs <chairs@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Cc: Tim Moses <tim.moses@entrust.com>
> Subject: [chairs] Updated Naming Guidelines for review and discussion
>
>
> The TAB has significantly updated the Artifact Naming Guidelines. 
> Thanks for the comments!
>
> We've added a context-free grammar for the names, extended examples, 
> and an editorial pass for consistency and references.
>
> Many of the comments were on the URN section (and its relationship to 
> RFC 3121).  I've pulled that section from the current workind draft 08 
> so we can get you the rest of the document now; when the URN section 
> is updated we'll send that to this list -- probably near the end of 
> October.
>
> There are updates to the OASIS TC Process and to the OASIS IPR policy 
> pending; these Naming Guidelines will be synchronized with those and 
> released later this year (likely effective date for all of these is 
> the end of the year).
>
> Comments are invited - to this list, or email to the editors (myself 
> and Tim Moses), or to the TAB list if you're a member.
>
> Thanks!
>
> bill cox
>
>
>