Re: IDs - make them case sensitive

 
> From: Murray Altheim <altheim@mehitabel.Eng.Sun.COM>

> The idea of not being
> able to have what is essentially a numeric type (ID) not be able to
contain
> a completely numeric value seems somewhat strange. Like my Sun ID# is
all
> numbers, my SSN# is all numbers and dashes, etc.

My guesses are it was

* to stop  "if a<3 then blort" causing start tag recognition, because
of the extreme conservatism of the original design (all those context
checks on delimiters),

* to avoid names being numbers, as a matter of human-readability.


Neither of these reasons seems applicable to XML.  But that is no
reason to get rid of SGML compatability. XML shouldn't call something
an ID if it is not an SGML name.


If people really want IDs to be able to start with digits, they can
also demand of their local WG8 delegates    
   "We want IDs to be 'name tokens' not 'names' !" 
or
   "We want a new type of ID (NID?) that uses 'name tokens' not 'names'
!"
or even
   "We want a new type of ID (el CID?) that uses CDATA rather than
'names' !"
or
   "We want lexical typing, normalisation and uniqueness-checking built
   at language level into SGML !"


Rick Jelliffe