Summary: Designing XML Vocabularies
Questions to ask:
- Must certain semantic processing and validation operations be performed by all applications of this vocabulary?
- Will more than one application have to deal with this vocabulary?
If so, its syntactic requirements deserve to be made explicit in a DTD (or something like a DTD), and
A property set (or other explicit Abstract API) defined for it will pay big dividends
- in software reuse
- in achieving widespread consensus about what the vocabulary really means
- in determining what went wrong when vocabulary-mediated information interchange fails