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Re: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers

• From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 16:47:44 +0800

 From: "XML Everywhere"
<host@x...>

> Who hasn't been surprised and a
> little miffed that values for "ID"
attributes
> can't start with a number?
>
> It's fine to reserve some characters
> for future use (such as
punctuation),
> but an element name is not
> like a C++ variable name.

Interestingly, either Netscape or IE,
in their original (pre-W3C) DOMs for
HTML JavaScript, used the name
attribute (i.e. the de facto ID) of an
element directly as an object name.

So the names had to conform to
JavaScript syntax rules for object
identifiers (which I believe includes
that the identifier cannot start with
a number).

So the tightness of IDs is not silly.
The issue is whether everyone should
be constrained by rules only required
for one kind of processing.  Well,
people can use XML Schemas keys now if
they wish, and that allows them to
have any arbitrary string. But I think
we can distinguish a useful difference
between a key and an identifier, where
identifiers are keys that may be used
as symbols in programming languages.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • RE: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers
    • From: Don Park <donpark@d...>
  • Re: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers
    • From: XML Everywhere <host@x...>

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