On 31 March 2011 11:38, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > The specification says "they cannot start with a digit"; Alan says > "they can start with numbers"; the question is therefore "are there > numbers that are not digits", and Alan is arguing "yes, if the > number is encoded using a character escape" (e.g., \31 to represent > the digit/number "1").
Thanks for translating, this stuff needs patience and interpretive skills! ;) Isn't this a hack in some sense? As you've pointed out, starting with a digit is contra-spec. Alan is saying an identifier starting with a digit can be used, but one has to express it in such a way that, in its explicit written form, it does not appear as a digit, and one way of doing that is by expressing the number under a different, non-digital encoding (only in the CSS — using the same string in the HTML wouldn't work). It's not at all obvious, and it employs a counter-intuitive writing method for the express purpose of evading constrictions expressed in other parts of the spec. A more intuitive and certainly more readable method (but less widely-supported — although at this point I am purely academically interested in W3 errata, since both methods are non-standard and confusing unless the viewer has express knowledge of it) would be to express the selector via the attribute selection pattern: [class~=1] Again, as far as I'm concerned, this is all academic. I work on large projects that must be able to be maintained by people with generic industry standard working knowledge, so I wouldn't allow this in at the risk of confusing colleagues & successors. But even from that angle, can this be considered good practice? Isn't it contrary to the specification's intentions in forbidding digit-led identifiers using the standard methods? Would you genuinely suggest this advice to the OP, or is this purely an exercise in exploiting spec loopholes? A simpler question, that has still yet to be answered, is why digit-led class or id identifiers are banned in the first place. Alan, Phil — any ideas? Regards, Barney Carroll barney.carr...@gmail.com 07594 506 381 ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
