RE: Unicode Normalization: request for TAG discussion and a finding

(personal response)

Hello Björn,

I think your expectations for what I18N will recommend may not match what we actually recommend :-).

I agree that user stories are important, although the languages most affected are also the ones that it is hardest for us to gather evidence from. It is also true that people have "gotten around" things not working by using ASCII-only identifiers, for example. The advent of more active or actively-generated content and better Unicode support, though, expose us to more problems in this area.

I believe that it is essential that the I18N WG's recommendations should be in harmony with what W3C Specs (and Web technologies) actually do rather than recommending something that is not generally accepted. I believe that these recommendations should then be embodied in a revision of CharMod-Norm. The I18N WG feels that this should include some normalization in selected cases.

Personally, I am looking to the TAG finding to help provide closure on this issue. If we do nothing prior to the advent of HTML5 and CSS3, I feel (others do not) we are making a de facto decision that will be very difficult to change later. I would rather the decision be one taken deliberately.

Addison

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bjoern Hoehrmann [mailto:derhoermi@gmx.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 9:34 AM
> To: Phillips, Addison
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Unicode Normalization: request for TAG discussion and a finding
> 
> * Phillips, Addison wrote:
> >Therefore, we would like to request that TAG schedule time in about
> >four weeks to review I18N WG's proposed recommendations concerning
> >Unicode Normalization. We would like to have some time so that we can
> >prepare materials for TAG including the options available.
> 
> Most helpful I think would be some user stories where people actually run into
> Unicode Normalization problems in day to day practise with the technologies
> under consideration. Someone posting on their blog how they had trouble
> debugging why their CSS Selectors did not match because the style sheet and
> the markup document used strings that looked the same but were encoded
> differently, for instance. Or people with accounts they created on one
> computer, but cannot log in to from another one.
> 
> So far I've largely not encountered people having problems with this, and
> believe past requests for affected users didn't quite unearth any, and I do not
> see any references to affected users in your references. I would think we can't
> find large groups of people who are bitten by this every day, there is not much
> of a problem to be solved, so we'd say it'd be a good idea if browser's exposed
> their NFC/NFD implementations as API and leave it that.
> --
> Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de

> Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de

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Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 19:07:39 UTC