Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

A Few Different Document Approaches

I have long maintained that you have to understand the data before you can really understand the system. A similar truth holds for schemas; the best way to understand a particular schema is to first understand an instance document that conforms to the schema. A few major variations in how instance documents look have predictable impacts on the schemas.

• Naming conventions: You are going to see a wide variety in style, lengths, and abbreviations. You'll also see some variety in capitalization and word separators, though upper camel case (e.g., UpperCamelCase) seems to be the preferred style. Just hope that whoever wrote the schema you are using picks one style and uses it consistently. You'll probably feel like ...