On 04/30/2016 01:26 PM, L. David Baron wrote: > I still find it sad that ECMAScript Intl came (as I understand it) > very close to just standardizing on a piece of software (ICU)
I'm fuzzy on the details as well, but I don't believe it was ever going to be the case that the spec would be "do what ICU does". Language *had* to be hand-wavy, because what is the custom in one language now, will not always be the custom. So some flexibility must be granted to accommodate this, as well as to not (in effect) specify entire languages as they exist right now. Now, in *practice* it might work out that behaviors would be what ICU does. But even there I'm not so sure about it. What ICU does, as I understand it, is approximately only what CLDR (all the language/locale-specific information about formatting, pluralization, word-breaking, etc.), plus standardized things like IETF BCP 47, tells it to. And CLDR's purview is not really areas where technical debate/disagreement/dissent makes a whole lot of sense, because it's just setting down what the rest of the world does. In any event, the "doomsday" scenario did not occur, so we're safe. > and also find it disturbing that we're going to extend that > standardization on a particular piece of software (possibly even > more rigidly) into other areas. Using a library to do certain things we do other ways right now, in sometimes inferior fashion, doesn't seem inherently objectionable to me. So long as the library's internal decisions don't bleed too far into the visible API, which I don't believe they did here. > I think many of the arguments we > made against standardizing on SQLite seem to apply to ICU as well, > such as security risk and needing to reverse-engineer when writing > future implementations of parts of the Web platform. I believe this should be mitigated by its being CLDR that will be the true dependency, and CLDR not containing anything but the most highly constrained of "algorithms" (for things like pluralization). But I'm happy to be corrected/enlightened by someone who understands ICU/CLDR better. > I think enough of our users are on Windows XP that decisions about > dropping Windows XP are not a purely engineering decision. Unfortunately I agree. Jeff _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
