Re: "Difficult Characters" draft

["Martin J. Duerst" <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 2 May 1997, Larry Masinter wrote:

> Other issues:
> The bidi issues for RLT languages in conjunction with
> normal punctuation used in and around identifiers. (Will
> the identifiers present themselves 'correctly' without
> these characters in all cases?)

That in an important problem, but should go into a separate draft,
because it is basically about display, not about input.


> Using UCS in identifiers that are normally "case insensitive"
> in ASCII, and the issues, e.g., similar upper-case forms,
> the role of accents and equivalence.

With "the role of accents", do you mean the French case, where
accents may be removed on uppercasing?


> I think "white space" or spacing characters in general
> need to be addressed.

Yes, definitely. They all need to be prohibited.


> You need to decide whether you're doing canonicalization/normalization
> or just equivalence.

I already decided, with the normalization algorithms in the draft.
But I guess I need to state it more clearly.


> Equivalence is probably easier to define,
> and less politically sensitive, even though not as useful.

I think equivalence is not useful, because it puts the burdens on
software that otherwise doesn't have any clue (and doesn't have
to have a clue) about internationalization.
Normalization is politically sensitive, but we either get
something working or something useless.

Regards,	Martin.