CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained • Hacker News Board

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#11

Post by lillycat » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #9

I might be biased because I recently spent a couple days wrestling with it, but I think the Turkish case is more interesting. There are two vowels that use the letter I forms: İ/i and I/ı So the lowercase and uppercase are essentially split into two letters and then a new uppercase and lowercase form is created based on growing or shrinking the originals. I'm sure it seemed quite the elegant solution in the 1920s whe…

The Turkic bug was fixed a week ago and we'll also be in Firefox 14. As far as I know Webkit still has this bug. I don't know about IE or Opera, if somebody knows...

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#12

Post by ars » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 7:48 PM UTC

underwater wrote: post #10

masklinn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really weird that they just add special cases like that. Though I expect it's just because they don't have enough special cases yet (went from one — for the Turkish I — to two). I'd have expected something like a generic Unicode-aware/y text management layer, and CSS text transforms would just go through that layer.

Eek. Not only are they hardcoding the logic but they mix their CSS-specific code into the function. I understand that they are handling a limited number of cases now but if I came across that kind of code in my work I'd be very sceptical.

That's called not over engineering something.

Making something more complicated doesn't make it better. Make it more complicated when you need to, not before.

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#13

Post by darklajid » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 7:58 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #5

robin_reala wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the diff: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/bb53aec4a302 Doesn't look too bad

It's really weird that they just add special cases like that. Though I expect it's just because they don't have enough special cases yet (went from one — for the Turkish I — to two). I'd have expected something like a generic Unicode-aware/y text management layer, and CSS text transforms would just go through that layer.

I wonder how the German ß is handled. Having no clue about the implementation of these transforms, wouldn't that be a similar case?

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#14

Post by iamgilesbowkett » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 8:12 PM UTC

there is no such word as "dependant." it's "dependent." really sorry to be that guy but it would hugely brighten my day if you could fix the spelling in the title.

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#15

Post by lillycat » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 8:26 PM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #13

masklinn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really weird that they just add special cases like that. Though I expect it's just because they don't have enough special cases yet (went from one — for the Turkish I — to two). I'd have expected something like a generic Unicode-aware/y text management layer, and CSS text transforms would just go through that layer.

I wonder how the German ß is handled. Having no clue about the implementation of these transforms, wouldn't that be a similar case?

Yes, in Firefox the 'esszet' is transformed in SS when in capital letters. But this done since a long time. The dotted and dot-less Turkic, and the Dutch IJ, are new in Firefox 14 (which is the first browser to support it, AFAIK).

There is some specific cases with accented Greek diphthongs, where the diacritic position changes in upper and lower case, but Mozilla is working on a fix.

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#16

Post by Navarr » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 8:39 PM UTC

Now we only need "text-transform: katakana" and "text-transform: hiragana" for emphasizing Japanese text.

Of course, this can't possibly work with Kanji without some special hack around.

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#17

Post by dbuxton » Sun, Apr 01, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #14

there is no such word as "dependant." it's "dependent." really sorry to be that guy but it would hugely brighten my day if you could fix the spelling in the title.

Well, there is such a word, certainly in the UK.

A more constructive comment might be, "the spelling variant you have used is normally a noun meaning 'a person who depends on another for their upkeep or care', where here you want the more normal adjectival spelling 'dependent'."

Although fwiw it seems that even as an adjective "dependant" might fly: http://www.wordnik.com/words/dependant

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#18

Post by mcpherrinm » Mon, Apr 02, 2012, 6:15 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #5

robin_reala wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the diff: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/bb53aec4a302 Doesn't look too bad

It's really weird that they just add special cases like that. Though I expect it's just because they don't have enough special cases yet (went from one — for the Turkish I — to two). I'd have expected something like a generic Unicode-aware/y text management layer, and CSS text transforms would just go through that layer.

The problem is that Unicode doesn't know about language. Unicode is just characters.

Language-aware bits are more gross, but then language often is. It's not nicely structured like most of the other things we encounter when transforming data.

Re: CSS text-transform is language-dependant: the Dutch case explained

#19

Post by masklinn » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 6:28 AM UTC

mcpherrinm wrote: post #18

masklinn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really weird that they just add special cases like that. Though I expect it's just because they don't have enough special cases yet (went from one — for the Turkish I — to two). I'd have expected something like a generic Unicode-aware/y text management layer, and CSS text transforms would just go through that layer.

The problem is that Unicode doesn't know about language. Unicode is just characters. Language-aware bits are more gross, but then language often is. It's not nicely structured like most of the other things we encounter when transforming data.

> The problem is that Unicode doesn't know about language. Unicode is just characters.

I won't blame you for this, it is a common mistake, but Unicode goes far beyond merely mapping characters to integers. The Standard Annexes, Technical Reports and Technical Specifications cover pretty much all things localization from line breaking [UAX14] to regular expressions [UTS18] through date and time formatting [UTS35] or sorting [UTS10].

And as it turns out, both uppercasing and titlecasing are covered by [UAX44] as part of the SpecialCasing.txt file which provides lower, upper and title-casing (along with optional conditions) for characters with non-trivial mappings (trivial 1:1 mappings are covered in the base UnicodeData.txt file)