Re: Hashing, and Ted's concerns about wastefulness

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.

Al