RE: Draft 2 of "How to Compare URIs"

> Is there some research behind the XQuery draft's position or was it 
> an arbitrary choice?  

It represents the views of the W3C member companies involved in the
definition of XQuery and XPath.  I have to believe they voted with their
implementations in mind.

>Do I detect the impact of SQL upper-case culture?

I guess by "upper-case culture" you mean the culture that puts reserved
words in SQL in upper case.  It is possible that people believe that
using upper case A-through-F makes the %-escaping more obvious as it
does keywords in various programming languages.  But I have no data to
prove this assertion.

> I suggest that if we discover that
> there is noticeably more upper-case than lower-case, we pick
upper-case,
> otherwise lower-case.

Microsoft's System.URI class uses upper-case.  What do others use?

/paulc

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada 
17 Eleanor Drive, Nepean, Ontario K2E 6A3 
Tel: (613) 225-5445 Fax: (425) 936-7329 
<mailto:pcotton@microsoft.com> 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 1:42 PM
> To: Paul Cotton
> Cc: WWW-Tag
> Subject: Re: Draft 2 of "How to Compare URIs"
> 
> Paul Cotton wrote:
> 
> > I have discovered that a significant amount of existing code already
> > uses upper case A-through-F characters when %-escaping.  I wonder
upon
> > what grounds you recommend the use of lower-case?
> 
> Aesthetic.  It's hard to believe there's a technical advantage either
way.
> 
> > In particular we should note that the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0
Functions
> > and Operators escape-uri() function [1] recommends the use of upper
> > case:
> 
> Blecch.  My personal experience is that I see more lower-case than
> upper-case, but clearly both are loose in the world.  Is there some
> research behind the XQuery draft's position or was it an arbitrary
> choice?  Do I detect the impact of SQL upper-case culture?
> 
> Anyhow, the interoperability benefit is achieved if people pick one or
> the other, doesn't matter which.  I suggest that if we discover that
> there is noticeably more upper-case than lower-case, we pick
upper-case,
> otherwise lower-case.  -Tim

Received on Monday, 13 January 2003 20:54:51 UTC