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

On Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:58:35 +0100, Philip TAYLOR  
<Philip-and-LeKhanh@royal-tunbridge-wells.org> wrote:
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> (Ignoring for the moment the enormous cost and pain of changing
>> codepoint-equality-checks to canonical-equality-checks in widely
>> deployed software and standards...)
>
> I cannot see any causal relationship between "widely deployed"
> and "enormous cost"; the cost would surely be much the same
> were there just a handful of users, would it not ?

I expressed myself poorly.

Lets try again:

* Changing equality checks in software is a lot of work. E.g. making sure  
the change is still performant, that it sitll works properly, etc. This  
cost only increases by the sheer amount of such equality checks in  
software dealing with Web standards. (I do not have knowledge about much  
other software to be honest.)

* Changing widely deployed standards has a high cost. Changing the way  
e.g. equality checks are done in XML would make *many* people upset and I  
doubt it can be done.

* Getting all Web software to do new-style equality checks has a very high  
cost and will lead to many years of non-interoperability and presumably  
decades of figuring out all the details and getting everyone to align.


> On the other hand, the number of parsers is small and finite;

There are many XML and HTML parsers deployed everywhere.

Besides that, performance matters.


> how many input method editors are there for all the world's
> natural languaqes, I wonder ?  That is surely where the real
> cost would lie, were we to adopt Henri's preferred solution.

The interoperability, compatibility and performance concerns for such  
software is much lower I think.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Friday, 6 February 2009 11:16:50 UTC