Too much latitude in Nmtoken characters?

[Eric Baatz - Sun Microsystems Labs BOS]

I don't understand why such a wide choice of characters are allowed in
in the June XML Syntax specification.

  [7] Nmtoken ::= (NameChar)+
  
Because

  [4] NameChar ::= Letter | Digit | MiscName
  [3] MiscName ::= '.' | '-' | '_' | ':' | CombiningChar | Ignorable | Extender
  [87] Ignorable ::= a whole bunch of characters like "zero width non-joiner",
                     "right-to-left mark", and "zero width no-break space"
                     
This seems to allow Nmtokens that aren't visible to the human eye,
for example, consisting of a single zero width non-joiner.

My limited understanding of SGML suggests that a Nmtoken is more like
a Name rather than a superset of it.  For that matter, is "9" a sensible
Nmtoken?


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