Re: [CSS21] Case-insensitivity not defined

On Nov 19, 2007, at 02:21, Mark Davis wrote:

> Having some of the characters be case-insensitive and some be case- 
> sensitive seems the worst of all the choices. I suspect that this  
> will lead to no end of user confusion; for example,
> 	• duerst = DUERST
> 	• but dürst != DÜRST
> and claims of favoritism for English.


This is not a problem when the comparison function applies to  
identifiers defined by the language itself and the language itself  
uses only Basic Latin for its identifiers. Those identifiers need to  
be English-based and Basic Latin-only in order for the language to be  
suitable for international use. FWIW, as currently drafted, HTML5 is  
ASCII-case-insensitive as well, so the A-Z range is folded to a-z and  
after that, code-point-for-code-point comparison is used against lower- 
case canonical names.

For user-defined identifiers, I think making them case-sensitive would  
be the best option, but I'm not sure if that's backwards-compatible  
enough. In any case, the comparison function for the built-in  
identifiers and user-defined identifiers can still be different even  
if both were case-insensitive in some sense.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 08:58:19 UTC