what characters are (and are not) allowed in style names?

[Sam A.]

Hi

I have a file with lots of paragraph styles and character styles. After exporting it as HTML, I got the following error message:

HTML export warning(s)

The file was exported but one or more problems were detected:

CSS name collision : 26 detected

The names of the various paragraph styles are unique, and I have not used any special characters in them. Some of the names that were detected in the warning message differ only very slightly, the only difference being a punctuation character or a space, for example:

;  a1 [that is, semicolon, space, space, a1]

;' a1 [that is, semicolon, apostrophe, space, a1]

So in order to make sure there are no conflicts, what characters should not be used in style names? What exactly are the limitations?

[Laubender]

Hi samar1234 ,

see the following discussion:

Which characters are valid in CSS class names/selectors? - Stack Overflow

Regards,
Uwe

[Sam A.]

Thanks, Uwe. I'm note sure I understand the definition found there: "only the characters [a-z0-9] and ISO 10646 characters U+00A1 and higher" – doesn't this mean that basically every character is allowed?

[Laubender]

There could also be a different depth to the problem with style names:

Check what InDesign does with a specific style name after export to HTML.

Maybe some conversions are done.

Regards,
Uwe

[Sam A.]

Correct, in the HTML version some characters in the style names have indeed been converted to a hyphen. As far as I can see this holds true for the apostrophe (U+0027) and for the space character (U+0020).

[hammer0909 · Accepted solution]

For best results, I avoid any unique characters as well as spaces in my InDesign style names when exporting to HTML from InDesign.

[Sam A.]

Thanks, Chad. I had not been aware that spaces can cause problems – now I'll stop using them in style names!

[hammer0909]

I think most browsers handle it pretty well however spaces get converted to %20 in the HTML/CSS. I just find it cleaner and more predictable when I avoid using spaces 😉