[i18n-activity] When should UAOA be used?

r12a has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity:

== When should UAOA be used? ==
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr53/

It's not clear from the UTR when applications should use UAOA.  One implication seems to be that it should be used any time normalisation is applied, however, "5.6 Other uses for UAOA" seems to imply that its use is optional and use just for certain operations.

If UAOA should be used any time Arabic text is normalised, it seems problematic to me to package the algorithm as a separate UTR.  For example, a large number of W3C specs require normalisation prior to string matching (think, for example, of matching CSS selectors against HTML ids). It is unlikely we can, if we wanted to, go back to all those specifications and require instead that they both normalise AND apply UAOA in order to ensure that strings match correctly. This is particularly complicated because we would need to say that UAOA needs to be applied only if Arabic text is being matched. On the other hand, if this algorithm were simply part of the overall normalization algorithm no change would be needed.

If the application of this algorithm is actually optional, or implemented for just certain operations, the situation is much worse, because it would increase the likelihood of mismatched strings in Arabic.

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Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity/issues/492 using your GitHub account

Received on Wednesday, 27 September 2017 11:43:03 UTC