Re: [ ACTION-107] Updating version list identifier algorithm

On 2007-09-10 17:48:16 +1000, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> I've been reading over the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) [1]
> and I'm getting the feeling that requiring implementations to
> support UCA (or something similar) would be overkill for version
> information: localized strings comparison in an internationalized
> context gets quite complicated as you would need to identify
> which language the version information is written in, etc, to do
> it properly. It also opens up a big can of worms about
> internationalization support for just one minor area
> (versioning), and not for others (resources/content adaptation).

Indeed.  Comparing machine-readable identifiers in a way that is
locale-sensitive is evil.  As an example that doesn't apply directly
here, consider the strings "ISO-8859-1" and "iso-8859-1" for
case-insensitive comparison in a Turkish locale (in which a dotted
capital I and a dotless lowercase i exist as well).

> Even though I originally pushed for having strings in the version
> identifier, after reconsideration I think we should drop back to
> the original proposal of just using non-negative integers
> delimited by a "." (as Firefox, and Yahoo!'s Widget engine
> currently does):

> eg. 0.1, 1.0, 1.101.03, etc

+1

-- 
Thomas Roessler, W3C  <tlr@w3.org>