[crossposted to alt.usage.english!]

On Sun, 10 May 2009, mat wrote:

> Probably slightly off topic, but hopefully someone can give me some
> insight to best practice.
> My problem is I've got an element that's name is an irregular noun,
> in this case "series"
> So all the "series" elements need to be put inside another element,
> currently I'm using "seriesList" because the plural of series is
> series:
>
> <seriesList>
>  <series>...</series>
>  <series>...</series>
>  <series>...</series>
> </seriesList>
>
> A colleague told me that this may be considered bad practice in
> naming XML elements.
> Can someone with more experience with XML let me know if my solution
> is alright?

I can't claim a lot of experience with XML, but seriesList does look a bit 
clunky. I am tempted to suggest serieses as the name of the outer element!

Can you call series something else? There are other words that mean much 
the same thing - list, sequence, succession, chain, run - all of which 
have normal plurals. Or is series a word from your domain vocabulary that 
can't be changed?

tom

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