RE: IDs - make them case sensitive

At 12:12 PM 7/1/97 -0700, Murray Altheim wrote:
>W. Eliot Kimber <eliot@isogen.com> writes:
>> At 07:45 PM 6/27/97 -0700, Murray Altheim wrote:
>> >Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com> writes:
>> >> Lauren and Tim have some good points regarding IDs.  It is a benefit if
>> >> an id can easily map between an element and either a real world entity
>> >> or an object in another database system.  Unless there is some bad
>> >> consequence to permitting a freer use of characters, relaxing the
>> >> restrictions just seems to simplify document construction and
>> >> processing.
>> >
>> >Well, the first thing that comes to mind would be that XML documents using
>> >IDs not beginning with a name start character would not work in existing
>> >SGML systems, and my understanding of the RCS is that it's not possible to
>> >modify what constitutes a valid name start character to allow digits. This
>> >would simply make XML documents and systems that create them incompatible
>> >with SGML. I certainly stand to be corrected, but it seems pretty explicit
>> >in 8879.
>> 
>> Not true, if I understand your point.  The reference concrete syntax does
>> not specify the digits as name start characters, but XML is not using the
>> reference concrete syntax and few useful SGML tools do not allow variant
>> syntaxes (and therefore will allow you to redefine the name start
>> characters) [The only one I can think of off hand in Panorama, which
>> doesn't read SGML declarations at all and simply provides a longer name
>> length automatically.].
>
>Well, unless I was doing it incorrectly (which is certainly possible), I 
>couldn't get nsgmls to accept digits as namestart characters. I changed
>both LCNMSTRT and UCNMSTRT to "0123456789" in the DCL and it produced 

I stand corrected.  I was sure you could do this--but I didn't have
handbook handy.  My appologies to Murray.

Cheers,

E.
--
<Address HyTime=bibloc>
W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
Highland Consulting, a division of ISOGEN International Corp.
2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
www.isogen.com
</Address>

Received on Thursday, 3 July 1997 04:56:51 UTC