hyphens in class names

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alex
Propeller Head
Posts: 96
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2006 11:22 am

hyphens in class names

Post by alex »

We have a legacy stylesheet which contains a few hyphenated class names (e.g., .drop-downAfterList). When I attempted to add a new style class (drop-downAfterBullet), Flare threw the following error:

Class Name cannot contain the character '-'

There does not seem to be any problem with the way the existing ".drop-down..." class styles display in either WebHelp or FrameMaker output; however, I would like to follow the rules now that I've been made aware that there are some :) On the other hand, changing the style classes with hyphens will create changes in a ton of files in our project, which is in VSS 2005. So...

Is there harm in leaving those legacy style names as-is?
Is there benefit to updating them to be compliant?

Thanks for any light anyone can shine on this.
LTinker68
Master Propellus Maximus
Posts: 7247
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 9:38 pm

Re: hyphens in class names

Post by LTinker68 »

From what I could see in a quick search at w3.org is that the hyphen is used mainly to separate lists of values or attributes, like separating the languages specified in the <html> tag. Nothing really jumped out that said that the hyphen was reserved for this purpose, but it probably wouldn't hurt to replace the hyphen in your style names. You can use Flare's find-and-replace to find all occurrences of the hyphenated name and replace it with an unhyphenated name. I tend to use a mix of upper- and lowercase letters in my style names (e.g., li.goldArrow).
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Lisa
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Warning! Loose nut behind the keyboard.
alex
Propeller Head
Posts: 96
Joined: Fri Aug 25, 2006 11:22 am

Re: hyphens in class names

Post by alex »

Thank you, Lisa. As always, I appreciate your help :)
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