CSS: question about colons

[Jeremy]

I apologize if this is the wrong group, but my usenet provider doesn't
carry any CSS-specific groups, and people in this group are likely to be
CSS experts anyhow.

My question is this:
In HTML, the "id" attribute of an element can legally contain a colon
character (":"). In a CSS declaration, how is this distinguished from a
pseudoclass specifier?

For example, if I have the following element

<strong id="Foo:Bar">something</strong>

And the following CSS to style it:

strong#Foo:Bar
{
some-rule: some-value;
}

It seems like the browser would think I'm trying to use a "Bar"
pseudoclass for the selector "strong@Foo".

So is it a bad idea to use colons in an element id, even though they're
perfectly legal? Is there some other way to specify this in CSS?

Thanks,
Jeremy

[Mark Parnell]

Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, Jeremy
<je****@pinacol.comdeclared in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

I apologize if this is the wrong group, but my usenet provider doesn't
carry any CSS-specific groups, and people in this group are likely to be
CSS experts anyhow.

news://comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets is the group for CSS.

So is it a bad idea to use colons in an element id, even though they're
perfectly legal?

Yes.

Is there some other way to specify this in CSS?

You could escape it, as with any other character:

strong#foo\:Bar

but what browser support will be like is questionable. Better to avoid
using it in the first place.

--
Mark Parnell
My Usenet is improved; yours could be too:
http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html

[Jeremy]

Mark Parnell wrote:

Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, Jeremy
<je****@pinacol.comdeclared in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

>I apologize if this is the wrong group, but my usenet provider doesn't
carry any CSS-specific groups, and people in this group are likely to be
CSS experts anyhow.

news://comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets is the group for CSS.

Thanks for this. I hadn't thought to look for "stylesheets" instead of
"css".

>So is it a bad idea to use colons in an element id, even though they're
perfectly legal?

Yes.

>Is there some other way to specify this in CSS?

You could escape it, as with any other character:

strong#foo\:Bar

but what browser support will be like is questionable. Better to avoid
using it in the first place.

You're probably right. I ran a test to see if it was reasonably well
supported to do this.

Mozilla: works
Opera: works
Safari/KTHML: works
IE6: doesn't work.

I thought it might be nice as kind of a namespace-ish feature on
elements generated by libraries, to make sure their IDs don't conflict.
But I'll have to use some other way I guess. Maybe they'll fix this
in IE7.

Jeremy

[Harlan Messinger]

Jeremy wrote:

Mark Parnell wrote:

>Deciding to do something for the good of humanity, Jeremy
<je****@pinacol.comdeclared in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

>>Is there some other way to specify this in CSS?

You could escape it, as with any other character:
strong#foo\:Bar
but what browser support will be like is questionable. Better to avoid
using it in the first place.

You're probably right. I ran a test to see if it was reasonably well
supported to do this.

Mozilla: works
Opera: works
Safari/KTHML: works
IE6: doesn't work.

HOWEVER: the other method of escaping--backslash followed by hexadecimal
representation--works in all of the above.

#foo\3a bar
or #foo\00003abar

Read http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/syndata.ht...ped-characters for an
explanation of the details, particularly for the special use of a space
to mark the end of the hex code unless a full six digits are used.

>
I thought it might be nice as kind of a namespace-ish feature on
elements generated by libraries, to make sure their IDs don't conflict.
But I'll have to use some other way I guess. Maybe they'll fix this in
IE7.

Jeremy

[Jeremy]

Harlan Messinger wrote:

>
HOWEVER: the other method of escaping--backslash followed by hexadecimal
representation--works in all of the above.

#foo\3a bar
or #foo\00003abar

Read http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/syndata.ht...ped-characters for an
explanation of the details, particularly for the special use of a space
to mark the end of the hex code unless a full six digits are used.

That's really interesting. I had never heard of that before. Thanks
for the tip!

Jeremy

[Andy Dingley]

Jeremy wrote:

Mozilla: works
Opera: works
Safari/KTHML: works
IE6: doesn't work.

Did you wrote that now, or is it just a standard .sig file for this
group? 8-)

[Richard Gration]

On Wed, 09 Aug 2006 01:35:51 -0700, Andy Dingley wrote:

Jeremy wrote:

>Mozilla: works
Opera: works
Safari/KTHML: works
IE6: doesn't work.

Did you wrote that now, or is it just a standard .sig file for this
group? 8-)

rofl ... first chuckle of the day, thanks ;-)

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeremy <je****@pinacol.comwriting
in news:mn9Cg.142$xB.80@fed1read10:

>
I thought it might be nice as kind of a namespace-ish feature on
elements generated by libraries, to make sure their IDs don't conflict.

I append a number to the id, eg:
<input type="radio" id="someid1" name="somename" value="r">Red
<input type="radio" id="someid2" name="somename" value="b">Blue
<input type="radio" id="someid3" name="somename" value="g">Green

--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

[Jeremy]

Adrienne Boswell wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jeremy <je****@pinacol.comwriting
in news:mn9Cg.142$xB.80@fed1read10:

>I thought it might be nice as kind of a namespace-ish feature on
elements generated by libraries, to make sure their IDs don't conflict.

I append a number to the id, eg:
<input type="radio" id="someid1" name="somename" value="r">Red
<input type="radio" id="someid2" name="somename" value="b">Blue
<input type="radio" id="someid3" name="somename" value="g">Green

But if I use colons instead, like

<textarea id="My_Lib:post_content"></textarea>

When people look at the markup they'll think to themselves, "Wow!
Namespaced form elements! Now *this* guy has it together. What a pro!"

And that's all I really care about, anyway.

Kidding.... Seriously though, the colon does make a lot of sense as a
namespace specifier. Underscores are often used in database field
names, so given something like "My_Lib_post_content", it's ambiguous and
nontrivial to discover which part is the namespace and which part is the
field. What if I had another library called My_Lib_post which had a
field called Content? Those two elements, if on the same page, would
conflict.

Anyway, I'm clearly putting far too much thought into this :P

Jeremy

[Toby Inkster]

Jeremy wrote:

Kidding.... Seriously though, the colon does make a lot of sense as a
namespace specifier. Underscores are often used in database field
names

Use double-underscore as a namespace specifier then:

My_Lib__post_content

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact