Robin Berjon

XML Bad Practices

Hard to Memorise Names

Good language design should make it harder for people to make mistakes. One of the most basic part of that is using regular, easy to remember identifiers so as to avoid typos.

With that in mind, something in the following non-exhaustive list should strike one as wrong:

W3C is an easy target in this area, but they are by no means alone:

There are arguments in favour of impossible to remember namespace URIs, but as anyone who's had to produce an XSLT style sheet outputting XHTML, SVG, XLink, XML Events, and MathML can attest these arguments are not grounded in pragmatic reality. They are too easy to get wrong, and — in part due to broken tools — lead to bugs that are sometimes difficult for users to uncover. Thankfully, the W3C is now on a more mnemonic namespace assignment policy rooted at http://www.w3.org/ns/*.

This article is part of a series on XML Bad Practices.