Hmmm... this is somewhat novel, so I hope you don't mind me copying
the list...
> Is there an official consensus on case sensitivity for tags,
> attributes, and values? I see that the current(?) draft of
> HTML 2.0 explicitly says that names are case-insensitive,
Not exactly. It says:
"Names"
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#SEC11
| ... Element names are not case sensitive, but entity names are. For
| example, `<BLOCKQUOTE>', `<BlockQuote>', and `<blockquote>' are
| equivalent, whereas `&' is different from `&'.
> but nothing seems to be said about attributes or values, and
> different browsers may implement vastly different results
> for seemingly-innocuous changes in the source.
Some attribute values are case sensitive (the ones typed CDATA
in the DTD) and some are not (those typed NAME or INPUT or enumerated):
ALT CDATA #IMPLIED
vs.
ALIGN (top|middle|bottom) #IMPLIED
ISMAP (ISMAP) #IMPLIED
> For example,
> in the TYPE attribute for the INPUT tag, NCSA Mosaic 2.4
> accepts only lowercase words (so far as I can tell), so tags
> like "<INPUT TYPE=RADIO>" are treated as having an unknown
> type.
That's a bug.
> As far as I can tell, this sort of situation is not
> covered in the drafts, and hasn't been addressed on html-wg.
That bug came up one time, but you're right: I should add a
note in the spec. When I get around to a detailed review of
the forms section, could you remind me?
> Obviously some values should be case-sensitive -- for
> example, values of the HREF attribute. But it doesn't seem
> to make sense to require case-sensitivity of many of these
> others.
> Is this an SGML problem?
Yes.
> Is it something that can be
> addressed with authority? I'll be happy to submit some
> suggested changes to the 3/31 draft,
Please do.
> or bring the issue up
> on the mailing list if you think it would makes sense.
I hope you don't mind I went ahead and did this.
Dan