RE: New test page: text-transform

At 09:12 03/10/22 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:

> > - For the following case, there is just no chance that this
> >    can ever work. How should a browser know whether to lowercase 'SS'
> >    to 'ss' or to sharp-s: lowercase "de" (German). Same for
> >    lowercase capitalize. Please remove these tests, or change
> >    them to test that they don't do anything weird.
>
>Well, I suppose one *could* make it work by using a dictionary lookup as
>you would for Thai wrapping or Japanese entry, although I agree it would
>be pretty surprising if someone did this.

Dictionary lookup wouldn't be good enough, because there are
words that are otherwise spelled the same (if you think about
it, that better had be the case, or it wouldn't make sense to
have a separate letter in the first place :-).


>I guess that, except for very special stylistic purposes,
>text-transform: lowercase is pretty well unusable for German.

Well, not exactly. If you have the original in mixed case,
then lowercasing works quite well, because there are no words
that start with an (uppercase) sz. (again, that makes sense,
because otherwise, there would be an uppercase sz)

There is another issue, however, that can cause problems:
To shorten text while being politically correct, there is
the convention to use upper case in the middle of a word,
i.e. "Studenten and Studentinnen" (students (male) and
students (female)) is shortened to "StudentINNen". The
stylistic uppercasing of this is "STUDENTinnEN", and
I guess the stylistic lowercasing would be "studentINNen".
This probably could be taken care of by some context analysis,
it wouldn't need a dictionary.

Regards,     Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 11:30:42 UTC