Sense key identifiers should be valid XML IDs

[jmccrae]

I think it would be much better if the SKIs are also valid as XML IDs. This means they should fit the following pattern

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]

NameChar     ::=      NameStartChar | "-" | "." | [0-9] | #xB7 |
                        [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040]

Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#NT-Name

This means characters like '#' can't be used and should be escaped. How about ':'?

[ekaf]

Thanks for this advice. I have changed the separator to colon (:), and intend to leave the issue open for discussion.

The XML specification that you cite allows colons in IDs, but discourages it since the main use of colons is to separate name space prefixes. The SKI project aims to support broad interoperability rather than specific formats like XML, so the separator could be anything, as long as it does not appear inside a word.

There are other reasons why the current format is not suitable for direct use as XML names: some words start with a number, or include problematic characters like slash and apostrophe. I am not sure that these issues should be handled here, because different applications require different conversions, which are straightworward to implement with very few lines of 'sed' code.