No, it doesn't. There was a strong feeling in the W3C Core WG that it be possible to handle the Astral Planes uniformly; every character off the BMP, therefore, is a valid Char as well as a valid NameStartChar.
Of course it would have been possible to handle the "Astral Planes" uniformly by making every character in them a legal Char, but not a valid name character or name start character. This would have avoided silliness like elements named after the musical symbol for a six string fretboard or the damage of using undefined characters in XML documents. It also would have been much more compatible with existing parsers and tools. :-(
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Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
