IDs - make them case sensitive

A proposal:

* Make the values of ID attributes case-sensitive



The HTML WG recently studied the issue. In summary:

  - current browsers don't consider <A NAME="xxx"> to be a
    target for <A HREF="#XXX">

  - there is no way to determine the language of an ID,
    therefore the case-mapping rules aren't known either.
    Any mapping rule will surprise some people.

  - case-sensitivity is easy to explain and avoids
    surprises (e.g., people find it easy to see a
    difference between A and a, much easier than between
    full-width/half-width letters in Japanese, or
    precomposed letters and floating accents, e.g....)

  - case-insensitive mapping is hard to implement;
    it needs a few dozen Kb of tables in Java.

  - the repertoire of Unicode/ISO-10646 is open-ended: more
    letters will be added later, but with case-insensitive
    mapping, the implementations won't have to change.

The well-known problem cases are the dotless-i of Turkish, the sharp-s
of German, the uncertainty over dropping accents from uppercase letters
in French.

For more info, see 

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-html-wg/1997AprJun/0177.html

and other messages in that neighbourhood.



Bert

Received on Friday, 27 June 1997 08:57:25 UTC