The XML industry is dominated by healthy competition between various standards and conventions, but without basic quality in the design of XML documents, none of the downstream considerations is of much importance. Regardless of schema language, query and transform technology, poorly-designed XML leads to systems that are difficult and expensive to maintain. This paper and presentation focuses on specifics of good XML design.

The quality of design of XML documents in the field is rather poor. As for individual documents one learns not to even take well-formedness for granted. There is not much one can do about this except to advocate well-formedness checking early in workflow. Even worse is the problem of poor schema design. Most of the XML produced and consumed in the real-world is of a home-grown format rather than a global standard such as XHTML or Docbook. It is all too common to find XML that shows little evidence of analysis, never mind design.

The core problem appears to be that developers do not take XML design as seriously as they take the design of applications code. And there is actually not very much in the way of published professional standards for XML design that can be used to establish best practice.

This paper presents principles of XML design informed by practical experience with the most common shortcomings of XML design in the field. Rather than being too circumspect on matters such as how to choose between elements and attributes, container elements and the like, it provides very clear and practicable guidelines to help promote consistency in designs that adopt its principles. Attention is given to form and accessibility to human authors and editors as well as to considerations of processing models.