Re: [xml-dev] A dandy little technique for constraining your stringsto ASCII
From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>
To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:30:37 -0400
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 1:07 PM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> 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.
