Re: Compatibility requirements

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 11:02 00/01/23 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
> At 02:31 PM 1/23/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
> >Canonicalization algo is an ongoing process.
> 
> Not for all character sets. It is fixed and done for Unicode, for example. 
> See Unicode Technical Report 15.

This is only true in the sense that normalization is fixed for all
the characters that can be represented by the set of codepoints
in a given version of Unicode. (characters here used in a way that
includes accented combinations, even if they don't exist as precomposed
codepoints). If new codepoints get added (which is done for Unicode,
of course), there is no way to guarantee that these new codepoints
can be normalized by an implementation that doesn't know about them.
I wouldn't know how an implementation could be built that would
achieve such magic.


> >  Upgrades and changes to the algo
> >is unavoidable altho we can define some basic rules. Therefore, there will be
> >times when the algo is different on different client, say v1.0 and v3.0.

Yes, the implementation will be different. But the result won't,
except that client v1.0 for some characters that were added to
Unicode after its shipping, will have to declare that it doesn't
know how to normalize.


Regards,   Martin.




#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org