Question on the ID attribute of a Tag

[Brian]

Hello:

I saw the following the other day in the id attribute of a div tag
and was wondering if it had any special meaning. Here is the example:

<div id=tag200\top\level_1\level_2>Blah...</div>

Basically I am trying to understand if the slash character influences
the resulting DOM in some way. I can see where *maybe* the slashes
might create a hierarchy of some sort. It could also just be a naming
convention. Any help would be appreciated.

TIA

Brian

[Jukka K. Korpela]

br******@hotmail.com (Brian) wrote:

<div id=tag200\top\level_1\level_2>Blah...</div>

Basically I am trying to understand if the slash character influences
the resulting DOM in some way.
There is no slash character in the <div> tag. The character "\" is
reverse solidus, commonly called backslash.

The markup is invalid. The id attribute's value must, by HTML syntax
expressed in the DTD, be an ID value, which means that must begin with a
letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits
([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods
("."); no other characters are allowed. (Moreover, _if_ the attribute
value were permitted, general rules would require that it be written
inside quotation marks, due to the presence of "\".)
I can see where *maybe* the slashes
might create a hierarchy of some sort.
ID attributes have no internal hierarchic structure in HTML. They are
just strings. Whether those strings will be somehow parsed outside HTML,
e.g. in JavaScript code, is, well, outside HTML.
It could also just be a naming convention.

It's a naming convention, and a wrong one.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

[Brian]

Thanks for the response...you are correct in that the posting utlized
a backslash. I intended to use a slash. The example is actually:

<div id='tag200/top/level_1/level_2'>blash...</div>

In general it sounds like a naming convention.

Brian

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jk******@cs.tut.fi> wrote in message news:<Xn*****************************@193.229.0.31 >...

br******@hotmail.com (Brian) wrote:

<div id=tag200\top\level_1\level_2>Blah...</div>

Basically I am trying to understand if the slash character influences
the resulting DOM in some way.

There is no slash character in the <div> tag. The character "\" is
reverse solidus, commonly called backslash.

The markup is invalid. The id attribute's value must, by HTML syntax
expressed in the DTD, be an ID value, which means that must begin with a
letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits
([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods
("."); no other characters are allowed. (Moreover, _if_ the attribute
value were permitted, general rules would require that it be written
inside quotation marks, due to the presence of "\".)

I can see where *maybe* the slashes
might create a hierarchy of some sort.

ID attributes have no internal hierarchic structure in HTML. They are
just strings. Whether those strings will be somehow parsed outside HTML,
e.g. in JavaScript code, is, well, outside HTML.

It could also just be a naming convention.

It's a naming convention, and a wrong one.

[Jukka K. Korpela]

br******@hotmail.com (Brian) wrote:

The example is actually:

<div id='tag200/top/level_1/level_2'>blash...</div>

It's still invalid, since a solidus (slash) is not permitted in id
attribute values, as I explained.

P.S. Hint on how to quote in Usenet messages:
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.html

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html