Hello,
Maven detractors blam maven POM.xml to become huge XML files even for
simple tasks.
Considering the comparison with ant, the latest use XML attributes an few
XML elements, making tasks declaration consise.
Could we introduce a new XML schema (for maven 2.1) to support simple types
elements as attributes, maybe using namespaces :
<project>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>my-project</artifactId>
<version>1.0</version>
</project>
... could be written :
<project modelVersion="4.0.0"
groupId="org.codehaus.mojo" artifactId="my-project" version="1.0">
</project>
We could use namespaces to avoid colision in maven schemas, and
support a mix of elements and attributs :
<project m2:groupId="org.codehaus.mojo" m2:artifactId="my-project"
m2:version="1.0">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
</project>
The previous examples are just to fix the principle. Declaring
dependencies and plugins configuration could become really consice and
enhance readability.
Nico.
