Writing XML

When I started playing with XML, I was an early adopter. It was interesting, intrigant. Now, everybody knows what XML is and other needs arise, such as “how the heck do I write those tags?”.

The purpose of this document is to propose a standard for writing elements and attributes in a coherent way.

Why?

I googled for XML coding convention, XML coding style, XML writing convention, XML writing style… I got basically nothing interesting.

So I went to the industry leaders and tried to discover a trend, a de facto standard. Sun with Java and Eclipse have a convention; Apache, OASIS and W3C have another one. Sun provides Java SE, Java EE with numerous XML files.

Apache provides Ant, Maven, Jelly and many projects using XML. W3C provides many core specifications (XML, XML Schema…), while OASIS provides application standards (ebXML, OpenDocument, DocBook…).

Oracle exports data from database in another way.

Proposal

Therefore, I enforce & recommend the following rule, based on OASIS:

• Applies to both elements and attributes.
• Applies, when possible to attributes’ values.
• First word is all lowercase.
• Following words are glued to the previous, in lowercase except for the initial.
• Acronyms are all uppercase.
• Use of intelligible words & abbreviations.

It is very similar to the naming convention used for a Java method (function).

Examples

Good	Bad
element	Element
elementName	ElementName, element-name
attribute	Attribute, att
allowLinking	allow-linking, AllowLinking
antiJARLocking	antiJarLocking
cacheTTL	Cache-TTL, cache-TTL, cacheTtl
database	db, dataBase

Preferred keywords

This is a list of preferres keywords for use in XML tags (elements, attributes and value of attributes).

Keyword	Comment	Prefer over
description	Description of an item	desc, descr
database		db
name
size
scale
default	Default value.	def
javaName	Name in Java.
className	Name of a class.

References

Source of Inspiration

This standard is used by / derived from:

Acronym	Name	Version	Organization	URL
SVG	Scalable Vector Graphics	1.1	W3C	http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11
RSS	Really Simple Syndication	2.0	Harvard LawSchool	http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
	Torque XML database schema DTD	3.2	Apache	http://db.apache.org/torque/dtd

Other References

• http://java.sun.com/blueprints/code/namingconventions.html