Re: [ba-unrev-talk] XHTML 1.1 and purple numbers
On Sunday 06 July 2003 10:31 pm, Chris Dent wrote: (01)
> A NAME starts with a letter, a '_' or an ':' followed by letters,
> digits, '_', '-', ':', '.' or a few other things. (02)
On a related note.. (03)
Something I discovered to my horror recently is that the definition of names
for CSS classes does not allow underbars. I had just blithely assumed it did
and implemented sets of classes which looked like: (04)
title
title_sub
title_pre
title_author
title_date (05)
and so on, using the underbar as a nice way to group CSS entries into sets.
Despite it being against the rules as I can find them, this is supported by
the major browsers at this time. (06)
A friend of mine (ML), investigated this issue and came up with what appears
to be the root of this decision, which dates back to the CERN days of SGML. (07)
ML wrote the following: (08)
---- (09)
See: (010)
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2001/css-underscores/ (011)
and: (012)
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html (013)
Apparently "title\_page" would be acceptable in this syntax. (014)
"The underscore is not in RCS (SGML's Reference Concrete Syntax), and
therefore not in HTML element names and attributes, and also not in XML, so
that was a good candidate to keep out of the identifier syntax and reserve
for something else." - Bert Bos -
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1997Feb/0116.html (015)
and: (016)
http://ref.cern.ch/CERN/CNL/2001/001/tp_history/ (017)
"At the beginning of 1985 [...] Berglund took the wise step of introducing
directly the reference concrete syntax of SGML... (018)
Berglund published the first edition of the CERN SGML User's Guide in October
1986." (019)
There you have it. That's a quote from CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee worked.
So your headache today was brought to you by Anders Berglund nearly 17 years
ago, on October, 1986.
---- (020)
Ugh. Who needs readable code anyway! (021)
bcl (022)