- From: Bert Bos <bbos@mygale.inria.fr>
- Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 16:45:22 +0100 (MET)
- To: www-style@w3.org
Donna Converse writes: > > Why is the yen sign allowed as a character in an ID name under CSS1 > -- but not the dollar sign? Let's give non-americans the advantage, for a change (after all, you can still use the cent sign) :-) > Why is the paragraph sign allowed as a character in an ID name, but not > the '.' dot? > > Why would the registered trademark sign be allowed, but not underscore? > > I imagine the reasoning behind this strange exclusion and inclusion was > simplification of reference to the "second half" of the Latin-1 > character > set and not more than that. Actually, no. We could have referred to `Unicode letters' and `Unicode digits,' but why exclude other characters? We just need to keep a few characters in the ASCII range available in case we need additional delimiters in the future. Just to give an example: the dollar could be used to refer to environment variables or attribute values, like $HOME, the brackets are good for some kind of grouping, or indexing. The dot is already used to indicate class names. The underscore is not in RCS (SGML's Reference Concrete Syntax), and therefore not in HTML element names and attributes, and also not in XML, so that was a good candidate to keep out of the identifier syntax and reserve for something else. > Anyone else interested in changing the set that is implemented to > include > underscore? Without escaping it? Underscores look ugly. They are an old method of _underlining_ text left over from the days of the typewriter. Ever seen an underscore used as a character, except in a computer program? I guess the underscore isn't useful for much, except to satisfy some programmers, but the problem is that it is not in the CSS syntax, so adding it means breaking existing software. Bert -- Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Bos/ INRIA/W3C bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 +33 4 93 65 77 71 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Wednesday, 19 February 1997 10:45:24 UTC