[Bug 16970] i18n-ISSUE-105: compatibility caseless matching

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=16970

John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
                URL|                            |http://people.mozilla.org/~
                   |                            |jdaggett/tests/radiobuttonn
                   |                            |amecase.html
                 CC|                            |jdaggett@mozilla.com
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |---

--- Comment #5 from John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> ---
(In reply to comment #4)

> Rationale: Unfortunately, compatibility caseless matching is necessary
> for compat with the extant Web corpus.

Actually, this isn't implemented consistently at all across user agents.  I've
included a link to a testcase for radio button groups.  Webkit browsers do a
case-sensitive match, Opera and Firefox do some sort of adhoc Unicode case
sensitive match (i.e. they don't completely match), while IE8/IE9 use an
OS-level compare function that does some normalization and some case handling. 
But *none* of these actually use the default compatibility caseless match
algorithm described in the Unicode spec.

While it's certainly better that the spec requires an explicit Unicode-defined
algorithm, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.  How much content in the real
world is actually using a variety of string forms across inputs, some with
diacritics, some with precomposed characters?!?

Since this effectively introduces a *new* casing algorithm into all browsers
(even IE which is clearly using a Windows platform string matching function
since results vary across Windows versions, WinXP vs. Win7), I think more
effort should be put into determining whether there's actually content that
requires *any* form of case insensitive matching.  If there isn't, specify case
sensitive matching.  If there is, then would Unicode caseless matching (with
*no* normalization) be better?

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Received on Thursday, 17 January 2013 07:48:53 UTC