Re: non-support of using surrogate pairs in CSS escapes [I18N-ACTION-90] [I18N-ISSUE-147]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 9:00 PM, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com> wrote:
> Dear CSS WG,
>
> I am writing to you on behalf of the I18N Core WG. During a recent teleconference [1] I was actioned with responding to a recent thread on your mailing list [2].
>
> Here's a quote of much of that email:
> --
> WebKit browsers don’t support this syntax for characters outside the
> BMP: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76152 ...
>
> There seems to be another way to escape these characters, namely by
> breaking them up in UTF-16 code units: `\d834\df06 `. All browsers
> except Gecko (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=717529)
> seem to support this, even though this isn’t mentioned in the spec.
>
> Should the spec be changed to reflect reality?
> --
>
> The Internationalization Core WG strongly opposes making such a change to the CSS spec. The Character Model [3] in requirement C045 requires that escape sequences be related to Unicode code point values, not to the code unit values used in some specific Unicode encoding (such as UTF-16). It is a barrier to content authors to have to convert escapes into UTF-16 surrogate pair sequences: it obfuscates the stylesheet, introduces additional processing complexity, and adds no value to support this syntax. Instead, user-agents should be encouraged to better meet the specification.

This seems to be the consensus of the CSSWG too, so no worries.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 1 February 2012 17:04:17 UTC