[i18n-activity] Unicode normalization conformance requirement may not be appropriate (#871)

aphillips has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity:

== Unicode normalization conformance requirement may not be appropriate ==
Conformance: Unicode normalization
https://www.w3.org/TR/webvtt/#unicode-normalization

> Implementations of this specification must not normalize Unicode text during processing.

>>For example, a cue with an identifier consisting of the characters U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A followed by U+030A COMBINING RING ABOVE (a decomposed character sequence), or the character U+212B ANGSTROM SIGN (a compatibility character), will not match a selector targeting a cue with an ID consisting of the character U+00C5 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE (a precomposed character).

This doesn't seem like an appropriate requirement. We recommend in charmod-norm against requiring normalization, but we don't prevent it from occurring and there are cases, such as transcoding, where it might be helpful. The requirement pertinent here in charmod is:

> Implementations MUST NOT alter the normalization form of syntactic or natural language content being exchanged, read, parsed, or processed except when required to do so as a side-effect of text transformation such as transcoding the content to a Unicode character encoding, case folding, or other user-initiated change, as consumers or the content itself might depend on the de-normalized representation. 

I'm also not sure that the example (quoted above) is helpful, even if the requirement is kept intact, since it glosses over the situation. Would it be better for them to reference the matching algorithm in charmod-norm?

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Received on Sunday, 29 March 2020 19:27:22 UTC