- From: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 12:55:41 -0400
- To: "Robert Burns" <rob@robburns.com>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
On 8/2/07, Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com> (edited by rewording to) write: > On Aug 1, 2007, at 5:04 PM, Jim Jewett wrote: > > "Note: Authors should be aware that some [legacy] tools may not > > handle all IDs properly. > > For maximum compatibility, authors should use IDs starting with an > > ASCII letter, containing only ASCII letters and numbers, and > > containing only a single case (upper or lower) of letter." > That's fine. I prefer using the term legacy tools for rhetoric > effect. As far as I'm concerned any tool that's processing HTML or > XML that is Unicode unaware is a legacy tool: even if it's created > ten years from now. That works for me; I would think of them as buggy rather than legacy, but it is a bug magnet that won't go away. (People can stop reading now; I answer his other questions, but the summary is "Works For Me") > On these issues (especially containing only a single case), could you > provide some examples of tool that have problems. Not that we're > going to include in the recommendation, but it would be helpful for > us to have research citations backing up notes like this. The situation that annoyed me most recently is part of an internal web site; some scripts compare case sensitive, and others don't. Most authors leave ID tags alone, but someone edited a template, changed case on attributes (which worked fine in what they looked at) and broke some stuff downstream. I'm not inclined to argue about whether this was sensible, but it happens; I doubt the "Are namespaces case-sensitive?" question will ever be fully resolved, and so people will make mistakes, regardless of which answer is correct. > The legacy tools part I was simply referring to the Unicode problems > and the case (-folding?) problems And my point is that Unicode and case-folding will continue to be bug-magnets for at least the next decade (probably century), so author recommendations for inter-operability ought to be conservative in what they emit. -jJ
Received on Thursday, 2 August 2007 16:55:43 UTC