I18N string best practices vs. design-principles

[aphillips]

I18N maintains a set of best practices (see also Editor's Copy). One set of these pertain to the definition of strings.

Design-principles has a set of best practices related to strings that prefer DOMString except when one needs USVString. This guidance is a little unclear, since there are non-DOM/non-JS/non-HTML specs that would prefer to use e.g. xsd:string or a string definition that is close to USVString (based on code points). We (I18N) have recently had to go through this exercise with RDF-star and a couple of other specs and this is causing us to revise our best practices.

It would not be helpful if TAG and I18N recommended different things. Our tendency is to prefer a string definition based on scalar value string with an exception for the space where UTF-16/WTF-16 (see #323) are the best practice vs. Design-principles (which is backwards from that). We also want to develop text that explains to specs that touch on UTF-8 based file formats why they want to use DOMString in their interfaces.

Note well: we are not disagreeing with the design principles as currently articulated.

I was actioned with making this issue. Please add the i18n-needs-resolution label to this issue. (Shouldn't horizontal groups have permission enough to set horizontal review labels on your document repos?)

[LeaVerou]

I was actioned with making this issue. Please add the i18n-needs-resolution label to this issue. (Shouldn't horizontal groups have permission enough to set horizontal review labels on your document repos?)

I wish this were possible. Unfortunately GitHub’s permission model around labels is all or nothing. Anyhow, I added the label.

[annevk]

(You could create a triage team and give them triage permissions. That's how WHATWG attempts to solve this. That gives people some power over issues, but no write access.)

[torgo]

Thanks for this @aphillips - we agree we need to be more clear - @ylafon took an action on today's TAG call to come up with a PR that adds clarity.

[aphillips]

@torgo @ylafon Thanks, although please note that this is not just a request for editing by TAG but for our groups to ensure that we say exactly the same thing. If there are differences, we should ensure that we coordinate or have an agreement about what the recommendations ought to be.

As a reference, here is what we currently recommend: link