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From: "XML Everywhere" <host@x...> > Who hasn't been surprised and a > little miffed that values for "ID" attributes > can't start with a number? > > It's fine to reserve some characters > for future use (such as punctuation), > but an element name is not > like a C++ variable name. Interestingly, either Netscape or IE, in their original (pre-W3C) DOMs for HTML JavaScript, used the name attribute (i.e. the de facto ID) of an element directly as an object name. So the names had to conform to JavaScript syntax rules for object identifiers (which I believe includes that the identifier cannot start with a number). So the tightness of IDs is not silly. The issue is whether everyone should be constrained by rules only required for one kind of processing. Well, people can use XML Schemas keys now if they wish, and that allows them to have any arbitrary string. But I think we can distinguish a useful difference between a key and an identifier, where identifiers are keys that may be used as symbols in programming languages. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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