Re: modernizing html output

[Per Bothner]

On 1/2/19 2:00 PM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> Nevertheless this issue is never going to go away, so we may as well
> deal with it now.  (If me or somebody else comes back to this in the
> future, they will probably have forgotten the details again.)
>
> First, is the ID type really too restrictive?
>
> https://www.quackit.com/xml/tutorial/dtd_attribute_types_id.cfm
>
> "The value that is assigned to an attribute of type ID must be a valid
> XML name."
>
> What is a valid XML name?
>
> https://www.quackit.com/xml/tutorial/xml_elements.cfm

I have never heard of "quackit.com" before, and would not take it in any
way as authoritative.  Except the actual specifications (mostly w3c.org)
I'd stick to developer.mozilla.org (recommended even by Google). Specifically,

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/id

For "polyglot" XML compatibility, technically the id should match Name,
which is defined here:

https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#NT-Name

Though actually the 'id' attribute is actually *not* special in XML
(unless the DTD defines it to have type ID), so it doesn't really matter.

> I believe there is a problem here, as a Texinfo node name could easily
> begin with "XML".  Otherwise, it seems okay.

The actual wording is:

    Names beginning with the string "xml", or with any string which would match
    (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for standardization in this or
    future versions of this specification.

I see no reason to be concerned about this restriction - I doubt any browser is.
This restriction appears to mainly be for the sake of attribute names, such
xmlns used for xml namespaces, not attribute values.

> At the least, <tt> is still output in some cases.

I think those should be replaced by <code>. In practice, <code> seems to be used
for general monospace content.  For example MarkDown translates `foo`
to <code>foo</code> (at least on GitHub).

--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/