Re: [xml-dev] A dandy little technique for constraining your strings to ASCII

From
John Cowan <>
To
"Costello, Roger L." <>
Date
2015-10-21T17:30:37Z
ID
<>
Thread
Re: [xml-dev] A dandy little technique for constraining your strings to ASCII

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 1:07 PM, Costello, Roger L. <[email protected]> wrote:

You want each string constrained to just ASCII characters.

You may want that, but it's a very bad idea.  As Tim Bray said years ago, the cost of internationalization is maybe 20% extra if you build it in from the beginning, whereas it's about 100% if you try to retrofit it.  Restricting your data to ASCII or any other set less than Unicode is a Bad Thing from day one.  Instead of restricting your data to fit your obsolete processing model, upgrade your processing model to reflect the realities of textual data in the real world.


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