[whatwg] [WF2] Web Forms 2.0: Repetition and type ID

[fantasai]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, fantasai wrote:
> 
>>I'd like to suggest that ID attributes use a different syntax than [] to 
>>mark repetition placeholders, one that fits with the XML restrictions on 
>>IDs. The current syntax makes it impossible to define ID attributes as 
>>"type ID" in any of the three major XML validation schemas, which 
>>affects both the usefulness of authoring tools that rely on IDness (e.g. 
>>for navigational tags or for catching duplication and referential 
>>errors) and the integrity of other specs (such as the CSS 2.1 
>>specification) that rely on such definitions.
> 
> It isn't a problem that schemas and DTDs would have problems here, since 
> HTML5 conformance checkers have to do a lot more than any of the DTD and 
> schema languages support anyway.

While we're on the topic.. what sorts of things would HTML5 conformance
checkers have to do that is impossible to express in schema languages?
(Aside from checking semantic correctness, of course. I hope you aren't
expecting that from a piece of software.)

> I don't understand what you mean when you 
> say authoring tools would have problems; why would they?

Generic XML editors like XXE have support for using a schema to guide
the editing process, but have no knowledge specific to a given language
like XHTML. These tools, and other generic XML tools, will not be able
to recognize the IDness of the 'id' attribute if it's not possible to
express this in a schema.

>>I don't care what the syntax is (I suggest :-replaceable-: for lack of 
>>anything better), and it doesn't have to apply to other attributes where 
>>[replaceable] is more natural.
> 
> Ok, I allowed two other characters to be used in the place of [] as well.

Apologies for second-guessing you, but I don't believe that U+2045 or
U+2046 are valid NameChars either.
   http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xml-2e-20000814#NT-NameChar
The list of Letter, Ideographic, CombiningChar, Digit, and Extender
character ranges all seem to skip over the 2000-200CF range.

~fantasai