Re: IDs - make them case sensitive

At 12:01 PM 6/28/97, Dave Peterson wrote:

>Should we allow practically anything as the internal name of an element,
>thereby allowing it to be also the external name?  By the same token, should
>we allow practically anything as the internal name of an external entity,
>thereby allowing the reference to serve as its own declaration?  Or should
>we treat them nonuniformly and do one one way and one the other?

Just to add to my own commentary, and make a possibly important point:

Of the several NAME namespaces (element, element type, entity, and attribute),
element-name (i.e., ID/IDREF/IDREFS-valued attribute) is the only one that
never occurs "in the raw": since it is always an attribute value, it can
always occur in the document as an attribute value literal--and hence it
does not need the tight lexical restrictions to prevent collision with
adjacent characters of many sorts.  So in this way element names are
lexically different from other names in SGML syntax.

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Saturday, 28 June 1997 15:09:05 UTC