3 ms·
Why do you need upper- or lowercase conversion in cases that have nothing to do with human language?
by inexcf 2y ago
Why do you need upper- or lowercase conversion in cases that have nothing to do with human language?
- vardump 2y agoHere's an example. Hypothetically say you want to build an HTML parser. You might encounter tags like <html>, <HTML>, <Html>, etc., but you want to perform a hash table lookup. So first you're going to normalize to either lower- or uppercase.
- Muromec 2y agoBut but, I want to have a custom web component and register it under my own name, which can only be properly written in Ukrainian Cyrillic. How dare you not let me have it.
- inexcf 2y agoAh, i see, we disagree on what is "human language". An abbreviation like HTML and it's different capitalisations to me sound a lot like a feature of human language.
- recursive 2y agoIs this a serious argument? Humans don't directly use HTML to communicate with each other. It's a document markup language rendered by user agents, developed against a specification.
- tannhaeuser 2y agoMarkup languages and SGML in particular absolutely are designed for digital text communication by humans and to be written using plain text editors; it's kindof the entire point of avoiding binary data constructs. And to GP, SGML/HTML actually has a facility to define uppercasing rules beyond ASCII, namely the LCNMSTRT, UCNMSTRT, LCNMCHAR, UCNMCHAR options in the SYNTAX NAMING section in the SGML declaration introduced in the "Extended Naming Rules" revision of ISO 8879 (SGML std, cf. https://sgmljs.net/docs/sgmlrefman.html https://sgmljs.net/docs/sgmlrefman.html). Like basically everything else on this level, these rules are still used by HTML 5 to this date, and in particular, that while elements names can contain arbitrary characters, only those in the IRV (ASCII) get case-folded for canonization.
- recursive 2y agoHTML is a text-based medium. But that doesn't make it a human language. Some human languages are not text-based. And some text is not a human language. ANSI C was designed to be written by humans using a plain text editor. That doesn't make it a human language.
- ARandumGuy 2y agoConverting string case is almost never something you want to do for text that's displayed to the end user, but there are many situations where you need to do it internally. Generally when the spec is case insensitive, but you still need to verify or organize things using string comparison.