XML 5e: One more fix, perhaps

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In my concern to address the Namespace issue, I overlooked a minor
point in James's [1] comment:

   ". . . the definition:

     [Definition: A *Name* is a token beginning with a letter or one
     of a few punctuation characters, and continuing with letters,
     digits, hyphens, underscores, colons, or full stops, together
     known as name characters.]


   ... is clearly not appropriate given the new definition of name."

Richard and I have discussed this, and agree that it is at least
inaccurate if not a bit misleading.  This definition is never linked
to, but the word 'name' is used w/o a cross-reference at various
points, and of course there may be references from other specs.

We haven't come up with a trivial fix, and we _could_ just do
nothing.  On balance we prefer the following editorial change:

  Reorganize and change the paragraphs at the beginning of the
  introduction to the _Names and Tokens_ productions as follows:

    An Nmtoken (name token) is any mixture of name characters.

    [Definition: A Name is an Nmtoken with a restricted set of initial
    characters.]

    Names beginning with the string " xml ", or with any string which
    would match (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for
    standardization in this or future versions of this specification.

     Note:

      The Namespaces in XML Recommendation [XML Names] assigns a
      meaning to names containing colon characters. Therefore, authors
      should not use the colon in XML names except for namespace
      purposes, but XML processors must accept the colon as a name
      character.

What do people think?

ht

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-editor/2008OctDec/0016.html
- -- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
                         Half-time member of W3C Team
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
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Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 15:13:32 UTC