PhyloCode prefix/suffix?

[Eric Zurcher]

At 10:08 26-10-2000 -1000, Richard Pyle wrote:
> > In raw HTML it would appear Apogonidae< but on a web page would render
> > as Apogonidae<
>
>Actually, I made a quick test page just to see, and indeed you can use the
>literal "<" as a suffix for taxon names within HTML, and it will appear
>unmolested when diplayed on the web page.
>
>For example, open the attached file in a web browser, and then view the HTML
>source.  Note that there are exceptions (as included on the attached file),
>but they should be solvable.  Any web gurus know of any other potential
>showstoppers that would require the "&lt" method?

First of all, my apologies for this post, since this in getting pretty
tangential to the discussion. But since the question was asked, I'll
attempt an answer.

Here is a quote from the W3C XML 1.0 specification:

"The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) may appear in
their literal form only when used as markup delimiters, or within a
comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed
elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references
or the strings "&" and "<" respectively."

So the use of a raw "<" character to represent itself in XML/HTML is
certainly bad practice. Just because current browsers will display this
character literally in some contexts doesn't mean that behaviour can be
relied upon in the future. In particular, I suspect that future XML
browsers will be less forgiving in this regard.

Of course there are a few other non-alphanumeric characters that one might
consider, in addition to the '!', '\', '<', '>', and '^' which have already
been mentioned in this forum. For example, '#' (Is that "hash" or "sharp"?
It depends on your viewpoint, I suppose.) Or "@" (for "apomorphic?")

Eric Zurcher
CSIRO Livestock Industries
Canberra, ACT Australia
E-mail: Eric.Zurcher at pi.csiro.au