Re: Characters in attribute values

After my question about a passage of the SGML declaration in
the HTML 4 draft ...

| ----------quote----------
|     NAMING   LCNMSTRT ""
|              UCNMSTRT ""
|              LCNMCHAR ".-"    -- ?include "~/_" for URLs? --
|              UCNMCHAR ".-"
| ----------/quote----------
| 
| So, how about that idea? Maybe ":" should be included as well
| then, though, for dealing with absolute URLs. (Perhaps "."
| and "/" could even be allowed as start characters too?) Would
| such constructions cause any problems, for certain older
| browsers or in some other regard?

... Peter Flynn asked for clarification:

> I'm not clear what use this is. SGML names are for things like naming
> elements or ID/IDREF values, not for URLs. Have you got an example of 
> where you'd use them in this way? I agree a wider choice of characters
> would be nice for names, but I'm not clear where URLs come into it.


I'm thinking of values for attributes like HREF, SRC and so
on. With the present declaration, it's valid to have
	<A HREF=file.html>
instead of
	<A HREF="file.html">,
but the quotation marks can't be left out in the (frequent)
case that there's a directory change involved:
	<A HREF="subdir/index.html">
has to remain that way. No big deal, but it's quite easy to
forget the closing quotation mark, especially for longer
paths.

(By the way, I'm aware that the spec recommends always to use
quotation marks, so it's probably not very logical to allow
more omissions anyway. I just happened to see the quoted bit
in the declaration and thought I'd ask.)

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Received on Thursday, 14 August 1997 16:19:15 UTC