- From: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 07:48:38 +1000
- To: "Murray Altheim" <altheim@mehitabel.Eng.Sun.COM>, <tgraham@mulberrytech.com>, <w3c-sgml-wg-request@w3.org>, <w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org>
> From: Murray Altheim <altheim@mehitabel.Eng.Sun.COM> > The idea of not being > able to have what is essentially a numeric type (ID) not be able to contain > a completely numeric value seems somewhat strange. Like my Sun ID# is all > numbers, my SSN# is all numbers and dashes, etc. My guesses are it was * to stop "if a<3 then blort" causing start tag recognition, because of the extreme conservatism of the original design (all those context checks on delimiters), * to avoid names being numbers, as a matter of human-readability. Neither of these reasons seems applicable to XML. But that is no reason to get rid of SGML compatability. XML shouldn't call something an ID if it is not an SGML name. If people really want IDs to be able to start with digits, they can also demand of their local WG8 delegates "We want IDs to be 'name tokens' not 'names' !" or "We want a new type of ID (NID?) that uses 'name tokens' not 'names' !" or even "We want a new type of ID (el CID?) that uses CDATA rather than 'names' !" or "We want lexical typing, normalisation and uniqueness-checking built at language level into SGML !" Rick Jelliffe
Received on Tuesday, 1 July 1997 17:47:25 UTC