[Bug 14145] Spaces in id attributes [was Could we define the id attribute so as to allow multiple unique ids to point to the same DOM element, by separating the names given in the value by spaces?]

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14145

--- Comment #4 from Thaddee TYL <thaddee.tyl@gmail.com> 2011-09-14 20:29:29 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > I therefore suggest to remove the sentence that says:
> > 
> > "The value must not contain any space characters."
> 
> Allowing spaces in IDs would break things that have a list of space-separated
> IDs, e.g. <td headers>.

While I understand this position, I would like to mention the fact that, while
browsers currently accept id values with spaces in them, they disregard <td
headers> completely (see http://jsbin.com/aguhuf/3) because they do not
implement DOM4's DOMSettableTokenList.

Since I hope to have DOM4 implemented in browsers, I wish to +1 Simon Pieters
on this one.

My updated request is therefore to:

- remove the parenthesized expression here:

"[…] user agents must associate the element with the given value (exactly,
including any space characters)"

- remove the paragraph that says:

"This specification doesn't preclude an element having multiple IDs, if other
mechanisms (e.g. DOM Core methods) can set an element's ID in a way that
doesn't conflict with the id attribute."

---

On the other hand, I would rather we specified the behavior that browsers
should follow when encountering an id value that contains a space.

Along the suggestions that spring to mind:

- Remove the id attribute (which will break the page if a script relies on it)
- Remove the spaces in the id value (which will break the page just as much)
- Let it pass, but show a warning in the dev tools, and let the page fail if a
<td headers> refers to it (which may have unexpected results since the @id
value will be cut in half in the @headers value)

We should make it clear that this isn't optimum behavior, though. Having this
parenthesized "exactly, including any space characters" puzzles me.

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Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2011 20:29:32 UTC