On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Eugene Alvin Villar <sea...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote:
>> I don't deny that the underscore can be used in a programming language
>> to represent a hyphen. I was denying that "Anyone with an good
>> programming background would immediately recognize how the formal keys
>> and values have been constructed". In fact, you don't even elaborate
>> on how the formal keys and values have been constructed other than to
>> assert that hyphens are replaced with underscores (something which
>> would *not* be "immediately recognized", as this is only done in a
>> small number of cases, and even in those small number of cases it
>> isn't always even apparent without doing research that a hyphen was
>> correct in the first place).
>
> Your point actually gives us a reason to use underscores instead of
> hyphens. If many people can't remember that two words are correctly
> hyphenated ("without doing research that a hyphen was correct in the
> first place"), why should we force "correct" hyphens when we can use
> underscores?
I never suggested we should force hyphens onto anyone. Rather, I am
arguing against forcing people *not* to use hyphens.
> There's a precedent in programming to use underscores to
> represent other characters other than spaces and there are several
> tags in existence that do just that.
As I've said many times, this isn't a programming language. It's more
of a markup language. Following common convention, I think we should
allow letters, digits, periods, hyphens, underscores, and colons (for
namespaces). (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 (".").) Case-insensitive, but with
the convention to use lowercase (it's easier on the eyes, and
compresses with text better).
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