Dot-Dot Convention

A simple convention, known as the dot-dot convention, for converting XML documents that make use of namespaces into MicroXML is to simply translate the colon (:) in names into two consecutive periods (..). While in principle such names may already be in use in the document, it seems to be pretty unlikely. Here's a simple XML example:

 <person:person xml:lang="en">
   <person:name>John Cowan</person:name>
   <relation:belongsTo>
     <organization:nonProfit>
       <organization:name>W3C</organization:name>
     </organization:nonProfit>
   </relation:belongsTo>
 </person:person>

This can be trivially transformed to the following well-formed MicroXML:

 <person..person xml..lang="en">
   <person..name>John Cowan</person..name>
   <relation..belongsTo>
     <organization..nonProfit>
       <organization..name>W3C</organization..name>
     </organization..nonProfit>
   </relation..belongsTo>
 </person..person>

The mnemonic value of the dot-dot convention is that .. looks like : rotated 90 degrees.