- From: Ian B. Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 08:59:36 -0400
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- CC: WAI Cross-group list <wai-xtech@w3.org>
My reaction to this is that: a) Allow anything b) Suggest restraint and provide the authoring, I18N, and accessibility reasons. c) Don't require a schema for every XML usage. I would like few rules and lots of persuasive rationale. - Ian Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > XML 1.1 is in last call awaiting comments on or before 28 June: > http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/ > > A question has been raised about whether there should be restrictions on what > characters can be used in element and attribute names, and if so what kind of > restrictions. > > The issue comes about particularly when people are going to edit XML. If they > can't determine the name of an element or an attribute (for example if it is > a symbolic character or collection of them, rather than a recognisable word) > then they will not be able to work with the XML language. For example, screen > readers do not necessarily have a capacity to present math characters or > "dingbats" - symbols like smiley faces that exist in unicode as characters, > and music notes may not be meaningful to people who are Deaf. Likewise, it is > important for international usage that arabic or chinese or thai characters > can be used by people whose natural writing script is one of those (and so on > for other scripts). > > Some thoughts have been suggested. Broadly there are a couple of different > approaches, although there are also intermediary possibilities. > > 1. There should be restrictions that require names to come from a single > range of characters used in a single language, and should be based on > meaningful words (this could be enforced by requiring a dictionary lookup). > > 2. It is fine to use any characters, since authoring tools can allow the > editor to assign their own version of the name for local use - i.e. doing a > search and replace before beginning, or whenever an unusable name is > encountered, and then convert those back to the required characters on > saving. > > A possible intermediate position is that an XML language must have a schema > which provides an annotation that can be used as an alternative name, or > documentation so the authorr can understand the purpose of the element and > provide a name useful to them. > > This has implications for and relationship to the XML accessibility > Guidelines - http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/XML - as well as for authoring tool > accessibility guidelines and internationalisation. > > The PFWG has decided to continue its discussions in public, to enable the > public working groups to easily join the discussion and see the issues. > > Cheers > > Charles McCN > -- Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs Tel: +1 718 260-9447
Received on Thursday, 20 June 2002 09:02:30 UTC