Am I the only one who doesn't see the point in having this kind of names for IDs/classes ?
Obfuscation maybe? That, off course, doesn't make much sense with tools like Firebug :)
Funnily enough, I just registered here, trying to use my first name Øystein, and what did ol' hackernews tell me? "Usernames can only contain letters, digits, dashes and underscores"
(In case you don't recognize it php will automatically turns names that look like that into an array.)
Or if you are trying to name fields from a multi dimensional array. Say name['foo']['bar'] - you would name the id name_foo_bar
Simple enough, except when you also have an array: name['foo_bar'] - which looks identical to the first one.
Now that you can use other characters besides _ to separate the fields that helps a ton.
PHP does not have access to IDs of HTML elements. Or did you mean something else?
When a form containing <input type="text" name="foo" value="bar"> is submitted, $_POST['foo'] === 'bar' in PHP. (And it works similarly for other server-side programming languages.)
<input type="text" name="foo[bar][]" value="yaw" />
$_POST['foo'][0] === "yaw";
For example, you can do something like this:
<a href="#hello" class="{name:'George'}" />
and then in jQuery you can retrieve the metadata like so:
$('a').metadata('name'); // returns "George"
Its incredibly useful for associating metadata with DOM elements without breaking the HTML's validity.
(I say this as someone who used to use random HTML attributes.)
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/elements.html#embedding-custom-...