Lowercase attribute names [Was: Re: small fix in the new-users article]

[Peter Pentchev]

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 04:19:54PM +0200, Marc Fonvieille wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 04:43:20PM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 01:08:48PM +0200, Marco Trentini wrote:
> > > 
> > > In the last commit I've noted URL in upper case.
> > 
> > It seems that both <ulink url=".."> and <ulink URL=".."> are valid,
> > and both of them are used quite often throughout the whole articles/
> > and books/ directories.  According to "DocBook: The Definitive Guide",
> > in SGML DocBook all element and attribute names are case-insensitive, so
> > it's okay to keep them that way.
> >
> 
> Always read the FDP first :)
> All attribute examples use lower cases; the lowercase need is not
> mentioned but examples can be used as information regarding the "right
> way."  Nowadays, "quite all" *ML things use lowercase for attributes.
>
> > However, Norman Walsch does warn that lowercase names should be used for
> > XML DocBook.  I'm not sure what the FreeBSD Documentation Project's
> > stance is on XML compatibility and on eventually moving to XML DocBook;
> > if this is the goal, then at some point we should do a search-and-replace
> > over most of the project's documents, since there are quite a few
> > URL=".." attributes all over the place.  What do people think about that?
> 
> Well we should be consistent in our code, just to prevent someone to
> think uppercase is what to use.  Since there are few "guilty" attributes, it
> should be fixed.

I think I may have misphrased my e-mail a bit :)  IMHO, all elements and
attributes should be lowercase, be it for standards compliance or simply
for readability.  Still, I wondered if there was some reason for the
fact that nobody has changed the uppercase URL attributes to lowercase -
either nobody had noticed (apparently that seems to be the case), or
they were indeed acceptable and there was no need to change them.

So... it would be okay for me to sweep the docs tree and change all
element and attribute names (mostly ulink URL) to lowercase?

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net    roam at cnsys.bg    roam at FreeBSD.org
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I am jealous of the first word in this sentence.
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