RE: [XML 1.1] Allowable element names

Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>

> I think pragmatically we should recognise that a lot of XML is probably
> created automatically from instance data, used internally to a small
> orgainsation, and that's it.

A lot in volume, certainly.

But XML identifiers are also used, for example, in IDs, XPaths,
Xpointers, Xlinks, XQueries, XSLT, CSS and programming languages.
So it is not just accessability for document readers, but also
for people writing programs and scripts and making links.

(X)HTML will (ultimately) adopt whatever rules XML uses,
so this effects what can be used in a fragment reference
in an HTML href as well.

That may be another way to think about it: what characters
are unsuitable for  anchor names in HTML.  Because linking
to anchor points in an HTML document is clearly something
that is very empowering about HTML, use of inappropriate
characters there will reduce accessibility.

I think the point is that, for accessibility, an identifier needs to
be text and not graphics. Hence dingbats and music symbols
and maths symbols are counter-productive in identifiers.

Cheers
Rick Jellife

Received on Friday, 5 July 2002 03:31:56 UTC