[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Case sensitivity
On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Stefan van den Oord wrote: > I have a simple question, I think: is XML case sensitive? In other words, > are the tags case sensitive? I also mean the <?XML... tag and the <!DOCTYPE > tag. Yes, XML names are case-sensitive (remember that they're not restricted to being English names, and many non-Western languages don't even have a concept of case-folding). Also, when trying to get your head around XML, it *really* helps if you use precise terminology. "Tag" has a very specific meaning in XML, and neither of the things you called "tags" are in fact tags. Your first example is actually one of either an XML declaration (if it occurs at the beginning of a main document) or a text declaration (if it occurs at the beginning of an external parsed entity), and it is also *wrong*; according to productions 23 and 77 in the XML Recommendation, the word 'xml' in such declarations *must* be in lower case (draft versions of the XML spec prior to the Recommendation allowed arbitrary case for this declaration, but the matter has been settled for over two years). Your second example is one of a markup declaration, specifically a document type declaration, and production 28 makes it clear that 'DOCTYPE' must be in upper case. Don't take this as a flame; it's just that my observations show that when people who are trying to learn markup languages use sloppy terminology like calling everything a "tag," they tend to get confused and have trouble building a mental model of how the language works. And if you understand that a tag is something different from a declaration which is something different from an attribute specification, etc., you'll have an easier time answering your questions by consulting reference material because you'll know the exact term you want to look up. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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