Re: [CSS21][css3-namespace][css3-page][css3-selectors][css3-content] Unicode Normalization

On Monday 2009-02-02 09:53 -0800, Phillips, Addison wrote:
> And I do suggest that thread participants go back and take a hard
> look at CharMod-Norm. The Internationalization WG is changing
> direction on this document. Today the document represents
> precisely this desire for "early uniform normalization". But the
> WG has come to the conclusion that this is impossible to reconcile
> with the current state of software. Non-NFC documents are widely

Why have you come to the conclusion that it's impossible to
reconcile with the current state of software?

In this thread, you have some browser makers telling you they'd
vastly prefer that approach to having to consult experts on Unicode
normalization for every API, every property getter, etc., to
determine what the correct behavior is.

I think switching to early Uniform normalization is something that
could be done in a single browser release for each browser maker.

Having to go through every Web-exposed API and decide on the correct
behavior with regards to normalization is an approach that will
likely take decades, rely on being serialized behind the judgment of
a very small number of people, produce a long series of decisions
whose internal inconsistencies will break substantive use cases, and
still interfere significantly with the worldwide usability of any
software built using generic mechanisms (since you're not going to
teach every Web developer testing string equality in Javascript
which cases should use normalized-equality and which cases use
strict-equality).

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Monday, 2 February 2009 18:33:53 UTC