Cliff raised a good point the other day noting that we're not doing a very good
job consistently utilizing attribute names. These effectively become reserved
attribute names, which Cliff has begun documenting in
doc/docbook/system/man5/en/attributes.xml
Not to start a bikeshed debate, but thoughts on convention? Consider the
current names used for storing a region identifier number:
region_id
REGION_ID
id
ID
While brevity was once a tenant of our design, ambiguity is obviously bad.
That leaves a choice of uppercase or lowercase with underscores, and camelCase
(e.g. regionId or regionID or RegionID, etc). My inclination is to make
attribute keys case insensitive (if they're not already) so a debate over upper
vs. lower would be moot. This would be case-preserving, but insensitive on
comparisons for the sake of usability.
Current attributes identified:
region flag ('region')
region identifier ('region_id')
material identifier ('material_id')
air flag ('air')
line of sight equivalence factor ('los')
rgb color ('rgb')
shader name ('oshader')
shader inheritance flag ('inherit')
Listed in parens is the current "preferred". I suggest that we change oshader
to shader and deprecate the (unlisted) variants.
More contentiously, we could prefix them all with "cad::" (e.g. cad::rgb) as a
simple scoped naming convention on the attribute name. Adding namespace
support could follow so users didn't have to specify the namespace, but could
to disambiguate.
Any thoughts?
Cheers!
Sean
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