Updating the IRI spec to include "web addresses"

(Please reply on public-iri mailing list):

I started working on trying to merge the "Web Address" concept into the IRIbis document, using the text edited by Dan Connolly and M. Sperberg-McQueen.

The biggest question I see is that an IRI is defined as a sequence of CHARACTERS which are independent of the ENCODING - whether UTF-8, UTF-16, or shift-jis or something else.

However, "Web Address" (or "Hypertext Reference", as has been suggested) is defined as a sequence of BYTES which in turn have a CHARACTER ENCODING which is taken from the DOCUMENT or SCRIPT  in which it is embedded.

I don't think this is a difficulty, it's just an observation about the layering.

My intent is to use "Hypertext Reference" rather than "Web Address" as the name of the concept being introduced, and to introduce a "href" BNF.  At this point, I'm planning on adding this as an appendix, and I'm considering moving the LEIRI section to an appendix as well.

Any problems with this direction? Special things to be concerned about?

Larry
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http://larry.masinter.net