jQuery Forum

Brackets are an invalid character in attributes, for XHTML served as
text/html, which I guess accounts for most of jQuery usage anyway.
Looks like someone already updated the docs.
- ricardo

Got a link to that part of the XHTML spec ?
Ouch, Atribute --> Attribute.
--
Ariel Flesler
http://flesler.blogspot.com

In XHTML, the name attribute on input (and textarea and select)
elements is defined as CDATA not NMTOKEN thus, brackets are legal in
name attributes on input elements. It is NOT backwards compatible with
HTML, where the character restriction is [a-z][A-Z]-_ and .
Further note, the id attribute has it's own separate set of
restrictions that are a subset of all HTML attributes.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#dtdentry_xhtml1-transitional.dtd_input
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#dtdentry_xhtml1-transitional.dtd_select
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#dtdentry_xhtml1-transitional.dtd_textarea
~Jason

That's kind of what I meant to say.
From my understanding, the CDATA rules apply if you are serving XHTML
as application/xhtml+xml. If you are serving as text/html it is
implied you are being backwards compatible, so you should go by the
HTML4 rules where only A-z,0-9,._- characters are allowed.
Anyway I was just being picky. Everybody uses { in class attributes
for metadata already, and most browsers (even the ones that don't
support XHTML as application/xml) don't have a problem with that, I
don't know how far down the chain that becomes a problem (IE5?).
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_8
What I really wanted to say is 'why are these lunatics putting
brackets in IDs/names? there are plenty of unused/unmeaningful
characters to choose' ;)
- ricardo

PHP automatically generates arrays from these kind of POST/GET keys.
That's probably the main reason.