The naming of elements is very inconsistent. Even though the choice of one letter for common elements seems appropriate, there seems to be no common technique for naming. The capitalization and vowel removal is inconsistent, as there are elements with names like: (from, but not limited to, Part 4 Section 2.15.1): ActiveWritingStyle, attachedSchema, documentType, docVars, endnotePr, hdrShapeDefaults) . This is not a problem with the clarity of the specification, but it complicates the implementation of it unnecessarily, as developers will need to refer more often than necessary to the document to check for a certain element’s particular spelling.
Use a common element naming system
throughout te
throughout
Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment CO-0237 (Modified: 2008-01-04) Although human readability is a design goal of XML, the specific element names or attributes used within any markup language have always been open to debate since the creation of SGML or XML standards, with some designers preferring long names and other short names (for example SVG, HTML, MathML and many others). It is often seen as a question of personal preference instead of a technical issue, and we note that there is also an argument that opaque element names are less culturally biased. We believe that Office Open XML can be read by humans because it is XML-based. In the case of DIS 29500, the comments about element names have fallen into two general categories: element names are too terse, or element names are not consistent. The terseness of some of the element names, such as <c> for cells in SpreadsheetML, is based on specific performance concerns and performance optimizations. There are usage scenarios for DIS 29500 that including millions of repetitions of the same element within a document. Since implementers need to extract the XML files from the OPC package in order to further process them, these repetitions can have significant impact on document size, which increases storage requirements and also increases parsing and validation time. For these reasons, Ecma TC45 used very small element names for certain highly repetitive elements. Regarding consistency of element names, the standard provides already a lot of consistency across names but we agree that there is always room for improvement and there may be opportunities for further consolidation of element names. This should be taken up under future maintenance of the standard, as it requires compromise between many contradictory opinions. For example, some commenters on DIS 29500 would like to see long element names reduced in length through the application of a “consistent abbreviation principle”, while others would like to see abbreviated element names made longer to add clarifying text. (Example: a suggestion to rename scrgbClr to ScreenRGBColor.) Finally, we note that SC 34 is standardizing a technology, DSRL, which allows XML names to be dynamically updated to a user’s preferred language while maintaining validity to the underlying schema. We recommend future consideration of this technology for this issue. Similar Comments: MY-0016 , NZ-0008 , US-0281
