Prohibition against interim unnormalized states

This is a last call comment from Jim Melton (jim.melton@acm.org) on
the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-charmod-20020430/).

Semi-structured version of the comment:

Submitted by: Jim Melton (jim.melton@acm.org)
Submitted on behalf of (maybe empty): W3C XML Query Working Group
Comment type: substantive
Chapter/section the comment applies to: 4.4 Responsibility for Normalization
The comment will be visible to: public
Comment title: Prohibition against interim unnormalized states
Comment:
Section 4.4, "Responsibility for Normalization", contains a requirement that states: "[I] A text-processing component which modifies text and performs normalization-sensitive operations MUST behave as if normalization took place after each modification, so that any subsequent normalization-sensitive operations always behave as if they were dealing with normalized text."

We believe that many implementors, on grounds of performance considerations, disagree with the requirement that normalization take place after each operation.  While we recognize that the Note following the quoted requirement suggests a way to ease the performance issue (using what we call "local normalization"), we believe that a couple of good examples will help ease implementors' concerns.  More importantly, we believe that some application requirements are best satisfied by allowing such (normalization-sensitive) operations on text that has not yet been proven to be normalized.  A requirement that such operations on such text result in fully-normalized text poses the unreasonable additional burden of doing complete normalization of possibly huge text without a clear application need to do so.

We urge the document's editors to modify the requirements to recognize the facts that some applications require the ability to use and manipulate un-normalized text and that operations on such text need not necessarily be normalized.  In XQuery, we have a normalize function to allow applications to *force* normalization when they require normalized text and we believe that this is a useful way forward.



Structured version of  the comment:

<lc-comment
  visibility="public" status="pending"
  decision="pending" impact="substantive">
  <originator email="jim.melton@acm.org" represents="W3C XML Query Working Group"
      >Jim Melton</originator>
  <charmod-section href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-charmod-20020430/#sec-NormalizationApplication'
    >4.4</charmod-section>
  <title>Prohibition against interim unnormalized states</title>
  <description>
    <comment>
      <dated-link date="2002-05-31"
        >Prohibition against interim unnormalized states</dated-link>
      <para>Section 4.4, "Responsibility for Normalization", contains a requirement that states: "[I] A text-processing component which modifies text and performs normalization-sensitive operations MUST behave as if normalization took place after each modification, so that any subsequent normalization-sensitive operations always behave as if they were dealing with normalized text."

We believe that many implementors, on grounds of performance considerations, disagree with the requirement that normalization take place after each operation.  While we recognize that the Note following the quoted requirement suggests a way to ease the performance issue (using what we call "local normalization"), we believe that a couple of good examples will help ease implementors' concerns.  More importantly, we believe that some application requirements are best satisfied by allowing such (normalization-sensitive) operations on text that has not yet been proven to be normalized.  A requirement that such operations on such text result in fully-normalized text poses the unreasonable additional burden of doing complete normalization of possibly huge text without a clear application need to do so.

We urge the document's editors to modify the requirements to recognize the facts that some applications require the ability to use and manipulate un-normalized text and that operations on such text need not necessarily be normalized.  In XQuery, we have a normalize function to allow applications to *force* normalization when they require normalized text and we believe that this is a useful way forward.
</para>
    </comment>
  </description>
</lc-comment>

Received on Friday, 31 May 2002 05:57:54 UTC