Issue IURIsearch-24 (rejected/closed)

Larry and I have received private mail a few weeks ago suggesting
that IRIs should be renamed back to IURIs to make it easier to find
them with search engines.

I'm usually not making formal issues out of private mail, but
I have made an exception this time:
http://www.w3.org/International/iri-edit/#IURIsearch-24

It is indeed the case that IRIs are currently difficult to
search for; Google for example brings up the first IRI-related
reference on position 54.

However, it should be expected that this will improve once the
spec becomes an RFC, and gets referenced from other places.
Search is also possible by using the full name
(Internationalized Resource Identifiers) or e.g. by combining
IRI and URI.

Searchability is not the only criterion for choosing a
name/acronym. The previous "IURI" made it difficult to guess how
to pronounce it. It also made the specification difficult to
write because the distinction between URIs and IURIs was less
clear than the distinction between URIs and IRIs.

Switching back to another name would mean that everybody in the
Web community knowing about IRIs has to re-learn.

So overall, I'm rejecting this issue and closing it.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 27 April 2004 00:16:51 UTC