plus and dot should not be a valid name characters

The naming rule is universal to all Launchpad. It comes from the validator.name.valid_name_pattern: "^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9\+\.\-]+$". Why is IPerson different? Should all be changed?

Why does user/name/fmt:css-id not work? The value should be compatible for classes too.

We want to remove '+' and '.' from the validator.name.valid_name_pattern for the same reason, they are not permitted in ids and classes. We should consider droping the version validator used by milestones and releases, but they must support '.'. Changing the rules will make thousands of pillars and and persons invalid, and we need a plan to deal with that.

This is not critical since fmt:css-id does the right thing now.

The valid_name_pattern is also used as the constraint for binary/source
package names, and we have no control over what can be used on their
names since we import them from Debian, so we may not be able to do that
change and keep binary/source package names using the same constraint.
(There should be a Debian doc somewhere explaining what can be used in a
binary/source package name, but I have no idea where to find it)

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Package name constraints are defined in Debian Policy 5.6.1 (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Source):

"Package names must consist only of lower case letters (a-z), digits (0-9), plus (+) and minus (-) signs, and periods (.). They must be at least two characters long and must start with an alphanumeric character. "

So, you can't very well exclude '.' and '+'. Excluding '.' would also make a lot of Python projects irate for no good reason.

I pointed that matter of in the IRC discussion when the bug was filed. milestones and releases have a different name validator. The real nature of this issue is that Launchpad engineers and zope need to do a better job of creating sane ids and classes to make valid XHTML.