Re: Capitalization issues

L. David Baron wrote:

>On Thursday 2003-06-26 02:01 -0500, Curt Arnold wrote:
>  
>
>>It appears in this case, the L2 HTML specification appears to be in 
>>conflict with the dominant browsers and an implementor has to make a 
>>decision to adhere to the spec or to maximize compatibility with 
>>existing scripts.
>>    
>>
>
>As far as I can tell, the statement in the DOM Level 2 specification
>that attribute names must be in uppercase:
>
>  For instance, element and attribute names are exposed as all uppercase
>  (for consistency) when used on an HTML document, regardless of the
>  character case used in the markup.
>  [ http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-HTML/html.html#ID-5353782642 ]
>
>has no analog in the DOM Level 1 specification (and is not listed in the
>relevant changes document [1]), which, as far as I know,
>only required that element names were uppercase (and said nothing
>regarding the case of attribute names):
>
>  The element type names exposed through a property are in uppercase.
>  For example, the body element type name is exposed through the
>  "tagName" property as "BODY".
>  [ http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/level-one-html.html#ID-822762427 ]
>
>This might explain why WinIE and Mozilla use lowercase for attribute
>names.  (Given the ambiguity, it might have been thought better to be
>compatible with XHTML.  The only piece of history relevant to that
>question that I can find is [2], which doesn't say that explicitly,
>although I did file the bug regarding element names only.)
>
>(Should this discussion move to www-dom?)
>
>-David
>
>[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-HTML/changes.html
>[2] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6152
>
>  
>
Thanks for the background.   I hadn't picked up on the differing 
behavior of attributes and tag names.

If attribute casing in HTML documents was not specified in Level 1 or 
added by an errata, then the L1 tests checking attribute names should 
use ignoreCase="true".  The same tests should then be reiterated in the 
L2 Core suite with ignoreCase="auto".

I'll try to review the case expectations in the L1 Core hc_ tests and 
report back on the www-dom-ts list.  The thread has (or at least some of 
my postings have) been speculative.  Once we think we have a good 
understanding of the tests and implementations, we can post an invite to 
the www-dom mailing list to review the thread on www-dom-ts.  We've 
cross-posted issues in the past and it makes it difficult to reconstruct 
things later.

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 16:28:07 UTC