naming convention rollup

Hi, Esteemed Committee:

As required by a To-Do, this note summarizes the pros and cons that have been brought forward on the naming issue:

*  Existing DITA has no consistent naming convention for compounds.

ol = initials of compound

propdesc = abbreviated compound

choicetable = lower-case compound

related-links = hyphenated compound

One common naming convention that existing DITA doesn't exhibit is camelCase.

*  A consistent naming convention has value because people who know the compound words don't have to look up the name.

*  As an extensible vocabulary, DITA has a greater need for more compound names than has fixed vocabularies and has a greater need for self-documenting names.

*  Programming languages such as Java have had good success in using camelCase for large vocabularies requiring self-documenting names.

*  Many data-oriented vocabularies have adopted a camelCase naming convention (especially CamelCase for elements and camelCase for attributes) as well as at least one extensible document-oriented vocabulary (TEI with camelCase for both).

*  Some (such as Wikipedia) claim that camelCase is easier to understand than all lower-case and easier to type than hyphenated compounds.

*  Long names are more difficult to type in a text editor and could bulk larger than the textual content within the elements.

*  An underscore can be easily confused with a space in a URI presented with an underline and thus shouldn't be a compound convention.

*  DITA has already adopted camelCase for filenames.

*  We won't modify existing names in DITA 1.1

*  We want to minimize migration and maximize clarity and ease of use for new names added by DITA 1.1

*  Namespaces could affect the issue if we support namespaces and, in effect, the namespace prefix becomes the first word of the compound.

*  Element and attribute name aliasing could affect the issue by allowing us to deprecate existing names or to support both camelCase and some typical abbreviations.

*  If DITA assimilates an existing vocabulary as a specialization, we probably can't change the naming conventions of that vocabulary.

Hoping that's useful,

Erik Hennum