Subject: Re: Hashing, and Ted's concerns about wastefulness

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 11:08:12 +0000

At 22:06 03/02/99 -0500, Al Gilman wrote:
>At 01:32 PM 2/3/99 -0800, Ted Hardie wrote:
[...]
>>Remember that typical hash functions care about control characters, so
>>we inherit the whole CR vs. CRLF kinds of problems.  Normalizing it now
>>is worth the time, not so much for the "seperately authored" case, but
>>so that the internal representations used to generate the hashes are
>>consistent across platforms with different conventions.  
>>
>
>If you can wait a while (time measured in months, not years), the work
>coming forward as character model and InfoSet for XML will give you a good
>foundation so we can have international tags and you can still normalize
>text if you wish prior to hashing.
>
>I am not sure we are going to agonize ourselves through the character set
>problems any faster than they.

I basically agree with Ted here.

I think the syntax is sufficiently constrained that character set problems
are not the issue.  I think we're just talking about whitespace
normalization (including CRLF if present).

The basic syntax is easy:  all whitespace not in a quoted string can be
stripped.

Named predicate definitions would need to be clarified.

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: Bill Newman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 07:11:51 -0800 (PST)

> The basic syntax is easy:  all whitespace not in a quoted string can be

Having spoken out before against normalization in general (as a
significant complication with small benefit), I'll chime in now to say
that this specific variant sounds reasonably simple, and that my
opinion on it is pretty neutral.

  Bill Newman
  [email-masked]