On 05.12.12 17:07, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
On 12/3/2012 5:39 PM, Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
OK, just as an introduction, why we're doing this: The ECMAScript
Internationalization API (which has been approved by Ecma TC 39 and is
on track to become an Ecma standard next week) provides web
applications with the ability to format numbers, dates, and times and
sort strings according to the rules of the language that the
application is using, not the one that browser and OS default to. Many
users are multilingual and go to web sites in different languages, and
even users who aren't sometimes have to use browsers that don't
support their language. The API in addition lets applications tailor
the results to their specific needs, e.g., specify the currency with
which numbers are displayed, select the date-time components used in a
date format, or ignore punctuation in sorting.
To implement that, we need good library support, and ICU fits the bill.
If I may be a skeptic:
Is this feature really worth the costs? Right now xul.dll is about 18MB
on Windows, and the entire install size of Firefox on disk is 91MB.
Assuming that the weight is roughly similar to mac, we'd be talking a
15% increase in on-disk size for a feature which seems on the surface to
be relatively obscure. Maybe it would be better to just not implement
this EMCA specification? What does this feature really buy us in terms
of strategic importance?
How well do the data files compress? Even more important than the
installed size, a 15% increase in download size could have a noticeable
impact on our install conversion rates.
I think we're having a more general issue with intl data right now.
Hyphenation dicts are in a similar bucket as collation data, I think.
Like, if chinese isn't hyphenated great, or sorted perfectly, I wouldn't
be able to tell. I can't read the script.
I'd love if we had a way to be sub-optimal the first time someone hits
the problem and then on-demand, download language-specific data later.
Which raises the question, how large would ICU be with mostly-no data?
Or, say, just the data for Chinese, assuming we could actually build
just the UI locale, and chinese was said to be big earlier in this thread.
Axel
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