Dots in tag names

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:22:18 +1300, Helen Borrie 
<helebor at iinet.net.au> wrote:

>These tags are for chapters in a large book of several parts.  
>It is being written in unstructured Framemaker but eventually, 
>after publication, much of the content will be converted to 
>structured FM (DITA).  I am setting out to "fix" a template 
>that has a lot of tags with spaces in them.  Already I have 
>encountered some problems with spaces in tag names during 
>trial conversions.  I want to avoid "camel case" tags if 
>I can.
>
>Is there any reason to avoid the dotted style?

No.  There's also no reason to avoid spaces, or any of the
multitude of non-alphanumeric characters Frame allows in
format names.  In unstructured Frame, format names are not
restricted.  Applications like Mif2Go accept all of them;
what problems did you have during conversions?  

The two situations I'd avoid in format names are:
1. Having names for different formats that differ only in 
case, like "Para" and "para", or in spaces, like "First One"
and "FirstOne", and 
2. Having identical names for paragraph and character formats.

When you go to structured Frame, you will be using element
names in addition to format names.  The element names *are*
restricted, but less than you might think.  Here is what the
XML spec allows:

[4]   	NameStartChar	   ::=   	":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z]
 | [#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] | [#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D]
 | [#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F]
 | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF]
 | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF]
[4a]   	NameChar	   ::=   	NameStartChar | "-" | "."
 | [0-9] | #xB7 | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040]
[5]   	Name	   ::=   	NameStartChar (NameChar)*

That is, a name consists of a name start char plus any number
of name chars.  You can't start with a digit, dot, minus, or 
accent.  You can use letters in several Unicode character sets, 
colon (Bad Idea, conflicts with namespaces), and underscore.

However... these names will not be the same as the Frame
format names anyway.  So making the Frame format names 
conformant to XML rules is unnecessary, and probably unwise,
since it could lead to confusion between element and format 
names later...

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/