For HTML 4, the answer is technically:
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
HTML 5 is even more permissive, saying only that an id must contain at least one character and may not contain any space characters.
The id attribute is case sensitive in XHTML.
As a purely practical matter, you may want to avoid certain characters. Periods, colons and '#' have special meaning in CSS selectors, so you will have to escape those characters using a backslash in CSS or a double backslash in a selector string passed to jQuery. Think about how often you will have to escape a character in your stylesheets or code before you go crazy with periods and colons in ids.
For example, the HTML declaration <div id="first.name"></div> is valid. You can select that element in CSS as #first\.name and in jQuery like so: $('#first\\.name'). But if you forget the backslash, $('#first.name'), you will have a perfectly valid selector looking for an element with id first and also having class name. This is a bug that is easy to overlook. You might be happier in the long run choosing the id first-name (a hyphen rather than a period), instead.
You can simplify your development tasks by strictly sticking to a naming convention. For example, if you limit yourself entirely to lower-case characters and always separate words with either hyphens or underscores (but not both, pick one and never use the other), then you have an easy-to-remember pattern. You will never wonder "was it firstName or FirstName?" because you will always know that you should type first_name. Prefer camel case? Then limit yourself to that, no hyphens or underscores, and always, consistently use either upper-case or lower-case for the first character, don't mix them.
A now very obscure problem was that at least one browser, Netscape 6, incorrectly treated id attribute values as case-sensitive. That meant that if you had typed id="firstName" in your HTML (lower-case 'f') and #FirstName { color: red } in your CSS (upper-case 'F'), that buggy browser would have failed to set the element's color to red. At the time of this edit, April 2015, I hope you aren't being asked to support Netscape 6. Consider this a historical footnote.
Unicode arrows heads:
- ▲ - U+25B2 BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE
- ▼ - U+25BC BLACK DOWN-POINTING TRIANGLE
- ▴ - U+25B4 SMALL BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE
- ▾ - U+25BE SMALL BLACK DOWN-POINTING TRIANGLE
For ▲ and ▼ use ▲ and ▼ respectively if you cannot include Unicode characters directly (use UTF-8!).
Note that the font support for the smaller versions is not as good. Better to use the large versions in smaller font.
More Unicode arrows are at:
Lastly, these arrows are not ASCII, including ↑ and ↓: they are Unicode.
Best Answer
The
<label>tag allows you to click on the label, and it will be treated like clicking on the associated input element. There are two ways to create this association:One way is to wrap the label element around the input element:
The other way is to use the
forattribute, giving it the ID of the associated input:This is especially useful for use with checkboxes and buttons, since it means you can check the box by clicking on the associated text instead of having to hit the box itself.
Read more about this element in MDN.