Re: [css3-fonts][css-variables][css-counter-styles-3][css3-values] Case sensitivity of user-defined identifiers

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Are we comfortable saddling authors with this ASCII-centric weirdness
> forever just because of an accident of encoding history?
>
> IMO, identifiers should either be case-sensitive for everyone (thus avoiding
> the issue, as per XML), or they should use simple (1:1) locale-independent
> Unicode case folding. Yes, it's not perfect - e.g. for the Turks and
> Lithuanians - but it's simple, predictable, and vastly better and more
> inclusive than the ASCII-case-insensitive anachronism.

Full case-sensitivity is a non-starter - the fact that we're upgrading
some language-defined idents into being user-defined idents (counter
style names with @counter-style, property names with Vars, etc.) means
that we *must* have at least ASCII-ci, or else the behavior is just
plain bizarre.

"Quick" unicode case-insensitivity is also full of gotchas.  Sure,
Håkon matches HÅKON, but it doesn't match Håkon (a + combining ring),
unless we do normalization first as well, which still hasn't been
definitively answered.

ASCII ci isn't great, but it matches the rest of the platform's
behavior, where it's case-sensitive everywhere but the ASCII range.

(I wish we could do full case-sensitivity and just make all
CSS-defined idents be lowercase, as God intended, but I've seen far
too many people write "Red" in their stylesheets to think that this is
anywhere near possible.)

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 19:16:36 UTC