footnote:id, colons and jquery

[Waylan Limberg]

I just received a [bug report] for Python-Markdown complaining that
colons are used in the ids of footnotes. For reference, we [output]
the same format at PHP Markdown Extra. The general complaint is that
the colon in the id attribute (`id="fnref:1"`) causes jquery to choke
when referencing that id from javascript because jquery uses colons to
indicate pseudo elements (as does CSS). As expected, jquery supports
escaping the colon - which eliminates the problem - except that
apparently the escaping causes a performance hit.

My initial reaction is to say that this is jquery's problem, but what
do you think? Should the various implementations that support
footnotes all change to not use colons? I couldn't help but note that
Gruber's unreleased implementation (what he uses on
daringfireball.com) appears to use dashes instead.

Any thoughts?

[bug report]: https://github.com/waylan/Python-Markdown/issues/180
[output]: http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/#fn-output

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Waylan Limberg