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Subject: Groups - New Action Item #0017 Spin off a separate numbered issue



OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) TC member,

Seraphim Larsen has created a new action item.

Number: #0017
Description: Spin off a separate numbered issue
Owner: Don Day
Due: 06 Sep 2005

Comments:
Seraphim Larsen  2005-08-22 16:27 GMT
From 8/16 TC meeting -- see this discussion thread.

I. General issue: CamelCase for attributes? 

Don Day invites Erik Hennum to briefly describe the
arguments for standardizing on a camel case naming
convention for attribute names.

Erik --
With DITA, as with any extensible system, there is a risk of
developing large quatnity of names. Need to manage names and
make sure names are intelligible. 

Other systems, particularly object-oriented programming
languages, have seen value in self-documenting names. These
names may be somewhat verbose, but can tell what the obeject
is about by looking at a name. 

Camel case makes clear where the word boundaries are. 

The TC should consider naming issues as new elements are
brought into system. How do we make those names legible? For
example, with single-case, compound names, how do we handle
the case where the last letter of a word and the first
letter of the following word are the same? 

Don -- What about the issue of renaming of legacy attributes?

Erik -- clearly we do not want to change existing names.

Paul Prescod -- if we dont change existing names, we will
have inconsistent names for some time. If we propose to
change legacy names at 2.0, we would have to go through
cost/benefit analysis. Benefits must outweigh the cost for
migrating legacy documents. 

Erik -- If we stick to our existing convention, as we
increase the names, were going to have increasingly cryptic
names. E.g., the name properties is taken. Any new
properties-related attribute would be a compound name.

Bruce Esrig -- consider namespace convention. Module dash.

Rob Frankland -- Camel case is easier than hyphen.

Robin Cover -- Will convey a set of references for several
NDRs (Naming and Design Rules) documents being used and/or
drafted by 6 or 7 organizations and government agencies.
Already logged as Action Item:
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/members/action_item.php?action_item_id=1000

Paul -- Authors would need to remember whether an attribute is camel case or not.

Alan Houser -- Most tools present lists of attributes, and
dont require that authors remember attribute names. 

Don -- Would this (camel case) possibly influence processing
architectures? Would this encourage processing based on
camel case features? 

Paul -- Would processes depend on Camel Case to identify
word breaks? 

Don -- Do we start this at 1.1, or waight for 2.0. 

Erik -- Are we presenting a problem by doing it now? 

Paul -- I propose separate issue: do we revamp naming
convention now or later? 

Erik -- Concurs. 

Rob -- Is this strictly a human issue or a parser issue? 

Don -- Do folded case conventions make sense in non-English
DTDs? E.g. many asian languages dont have the concept of
case. Is there an implicit assumption that were using a
mixed case language? 

Bruce -- Word boundaries are always a problem in asian
languages. 

Don -- Question to Paul Prescod: Have you seen customers
rewrite DTDs to a non-english language? 

Pauls response -- We encourage people to use the authoring
tools user interface to present different names to authors.
This doesnt break processing. 

Erik -- any convention for names thats specific to a
language does not present a problem for other languages. 

Don -- spinning off a separate numbered issue. Will add
issue, make Erik owner (ACTION ITEM). 

Paul -- DITA is not currently consistent with respect to use
of dashes, capitalization. Document-oriented DTDs dont
tend to use camel case as much as data-oriented. This is
probably an artifact of our case-insensitive SGML legacy.




View Details:
http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/members/action_item.php?action_item_id=1001



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