output html as lower case?

Hi Everyone,

Just pinging the list about a conversation I had with David Li about
making XMLC output HTML in lower case.  HTML tags are not case
sensitive, but XHTML is (because it is XML compliant).  Now, the
reason why having XMLC output tags in all upper case is kind of annoying
(besides the ugliness of all upper case) is for things like XPath which,
being an application of XML, is also case sensitive.  If I write an
XPath _expression_, it will only work on HTML and not XHTML or vice-versa,
but not both.

For example, the following XPath will work on an XMLC-formatted HTML
document but not on an XHTML document with the same 
structure...

/HTML/HEAD/TITLE

For the XHTML document, I'd have to use...

/html/head/title

Basically, what I propose is to for HTML output to be all lower case just
like XHTML output.  That will make it so we can count on a single
case for all elements making the latter XPath _expression_ work for HTML,
XHTML, and XML documents.  I suppose this should also be extended to
WML and any other type of *ML as well (if they don't already do it
anyway).  Does this make sense to do?  Will it break anything
out there?  Can anyone think of any problems that might be caused by
a change like this?

I'd like to see this in the XMLC-2.2 release unless someone can think of
major compatibility problems that might occur.  Comments?


Below is a copy of the question I posed to David Li and his
response....

At 10:12 AM 6/13/2003 +0900, you wrote:
> > Yes,
> > but we control how HTML is stored in the DOM.  I think we could
> > force it all to lower case just as XHTML requires.  I think we
> > should be able to use XPath without having to go through a filter to make
> > it work for XMLC doms.  I'm not sure what would be entailed in
> > forcing all the elements in the XMLC dom to be stored in lower case as
> > opposed to upper case, though.  What does Xerces2 html dom Impl
> > do?  I guess we should probably do whatever it does.
>
> It's done by the XMLC codes and should not be hard to change. I will look
> into this. I think there isn't any problem changing the case of element
> name from upper to lower case. 


Jake