- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 09:27:53 -0400 (EDT)
- To: "Ian B. Jacobs" <ij@w3.org>
- cc: WAI Cross-group list <wai-xtech@w3.org>
I like the permissive approach. There are a couple of things I didn't want to allow - control characters, and combining accent characters where they could be normalised. In other words, it should be OK to have a "c-cedilla" as a single character, but I wouldn't like to have c followed by a character that adds a cedilla to the previous character, nor would I like to have a line-feed character allowed. I would also like to ensure that the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines explicitly ensure that there is a way of presenting the required information so the user can deal with it - I think that this is explicitly covered by checkpoint 7.3 [1], with implicit support from 7.1 [2] and 7.2 [3] [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-ATAG10-20000203/#check-edit-elements [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-ATAG10-20000203/#check-use-system-conventions [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-ATAG10-20000203/#check-independent-styles (All references to Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Recommendation) cheers Charles On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Ian B. Jacobs wrote: 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 > -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Thursday, 20 June 2002 09:28:14 UTC