Re: draft-duerst-iri-07.txt: 2 week mailing list last call

Hello Graham,

This is my last reply. Many thanks again for your comments.
This is issue needAPI-34.

At 12:02 04/05/10 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:

>Finally, I find myself being vaguely concerned about the complexity and 
>subtlety of this specification.  I expect that a lot of software will be 
>written by programmers who are not aware of the various subtle 
>implications of I18N issues.  As such, will it be a realistic expectation 
>for such programmers to write robust interoperable software based on this 
>specification.  Or, another way of addressing this concern:  to what 
>extent can the various subtleties described here be wrapped up in a 
>library that can be used successfully by a programmer who is not expert in 
>I18N issues?
>
>(I think part of the difficulty here is the extent to which IRIs straddle 
>wire-protocol and user presentation concerns.  I don't normally advocate 
>the idea of standardized APIs, but wonder if this is a case for which 
>defining a common API might help to flush out some of these concerns.)

We have already seen implementations of IRIs in various browsers
(Opera, Safari, IE (with the exception of IDN), Amaya, Netscape).
Nobody from these implementers has every mentioned the need for
an API, at least not to me.

In many cases I guess APIs for URIs are reused by making use
of the fact that IRIs essentially work the same way as URIs,
and in many programming languages these days representing
Unicode is no longer that much of a problem.

There may be other applications than browser that have other
needs. But I'm not sure we could guess their needs now.

If there turns out to be a need for an API in some area in
the future, I'm confident this can be addressed as a separate
project.


Regards,     Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 12 May 2004 05:27:50 UTC