Re: several messages about New Vocabularies in text/html

On May 23, 2008, at 12:24 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> There were numerous requests for this change and it was made some  
> time ago

Indeed, | incorrectly assumed that <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11448#c6 
 > indicated HTML5 changing in the same direction as WebKit, so I  
didn't immediately go to verify that.

> -- does the change actually break anything?

Certainly, this change would cause rendering differences, presumably  
including line breaking ones, but I do not know if there are pages in  
the wild that would be considered broken.

I could try implementing the current HTML5 mapping in WebKit to see if  
bug reports arrive, but past experience tells that discovering issues  
like this often takes longer than one release cycle, and not  
necessarily because the impact is small. So, I'd prefer to avoid  
further jumping back and forth implementation-wise, if possible.

> My understanding is that the original lang and rang codepoints were  
> CJK
> characters only because no better characters existed.


Actually, they were not - the original mapping was to unified  
characters, which were later deprecated in favor of CJK ones, while  
new characters were added for other uses.

It seems that we are facing basically the same issue the Unicode  
consortium faced with disunification of U+2329/U+232A, but resolving  
it differently. That's confusing!

- WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov

Received on Friday, 23 May 2008 09:05:07 UTC