The old idea of style

I have been reading through the discussions on the Profile and it 
occurred to me that the concept of coding style would be appropriate 
to introduce somewhere. In this spec the order of the elements in any 
given tag is free to be in any order you wish. There is a very good 
reason for this and it is directly related to good style. Good style 
says you should group code in a way that best serves the situation.  

Situations vary greatly and no one order can serve even a majority of 
the situations that could come up in rss coding. There is just too 
many variable factors here. Is the code being generated by hand or by 
program. Is it pure rss or are other namespace elements included. 
Categories can be very varied. Not only can various catologing 
systems be included but a feed could include elements that purely 
match different categories. e.g I author a website for a festival 
that has classical chamber and jazz performances. Each performances 
is generally pure in it's style of music though other media besides 
live music can be included. Music would be far too broad a category. 
To truely serve the purpose of the category tag both styles of music 
have to be included. The best order for the tags would vary according 
to these factors and others.

Anyone subscribing to this group is probably a serious coder and 
knows the flexibility in this spec is to allow good style and not 
permission to go completely random. But these specs will be read by 
people that are essentially at the cut and paste stage so the need 
for good style should probably be mentioned say in a starting out 
page. 

We have a good set of clear specs here, a profile that will help 
people keep out of trouble given the common usage of these specs, and 
perhaps a set of guiding principles that we all here take for 
granted, would be a good idea for the less experience using these 
documents. Would have to be guiding principles because because we are 
dealing with an area where the goal would be deciding what is 
appropriate. 

I hope I do not offend anyone with this message. I am use to a style 
of arguement where you state all the important factors even if you 
are sure your audience knows them. I have been tutoring people all my 
life and I am a bit old now. By habit, anytime I come across 
documents like this I ask myself who is the audience an if it is in 
part people that may know little of the subject; would they get lost? 
Step by step tutorials are great if they are illustrating the basic 
ideas. Otherwise the novice has trouble moving on beyond the specific 
examples given. If our goal here is to promote the common and good 
use of this standard we do have some responsibility to the newcomer 
trying to learn it with a weak base of knowledge in programming as 
well as the hardcore professional.


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