RE: Is there a way...

Daniel Glazman had an excellent response to this thread, so I won't add
much.

Jan Roland Eriksson [mailto:jrexon@newsguy.com] wrote:
>Could you just not have displayed a bit of honesty and said?...
>  "Hey guys, Chris asked us to change the spec since it would
>   emerge to terrible problem for him to make IE6 fully CSS
>   compatible if we did not."

I presume you're speaking of me there, and not Chris Lilley (or one of
the other gazillion Chrises in the world).

That would have had nothing to do with honesty, since I did no such
thing.  I was not really even aware of this issue until fairly recently;
and though I think it is completely lame, and agree with the consensus
that it is an errata that should be fixed, it would not cause
significant pain for my development team to enforce this restriction.
It probably WOULD have pissed off a few content developers who wanted to
use it, but it's no more concerning in terms of our implementation than
not allowing classes to start with digits (which is enforced under the
DOCTYPE switch in IE6).

>>CSS 2 is applicable to XML and CSS 2 did not allow identifiers
>>beginning with an underscore.
>
>No one has "died" from that in the last three years, right? (except MS
>maybe?) And if you think that a simple underscore addition to CSS2 will
>save the day, maybe you should spend some quality time on studies of
XML
>naming conventions :)

Heh.  Hasn't hurt Microsoft a bit, since we incidentally allowed them.
And since a lot of people use them in real-world pages, I suspect the
CSS Working Group (which I have not been personally a member of for over
a year now) simply thought it would be a good idea to correct the spec.

-Chris Wilson

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2001 12:47:12 UTC