Re: IRIs in href (Was: Notes on validome test suite / validators comparison)

olivier Thereaux wrote:
> 
> 
> On Oct 25, 2007, at 03:39 , Frank Ellermann wrote:
>> Users want that something happens when they
>> click on a link, without upgrading their browser.  And native IRIs
>> are designed to have an equivalent URI-form.
> 
> Lack of support for IRIs in legacy user agents is an issue, understood.
> Now, if today the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specs and above were updated 
> to say "IRIs" instead of "URIs", what would you do?
> 
> As I wrote before, these specs were written before IRIs were a reality.
> The HTML4 spec contains advice on how to treat "URIs containing 
> non-ASCII characters".
> See   http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.1
> Although it clearly calls these illegal, it prepares the ground for IRIs 
> (for which we didn't yet have that name at that time).
> 
> Saying that IRIs should not be used because they break in legacy 
> software, is an argument I have sympathy for, but have trouble 
> accepting. This reminds me of the situation whereby, in Japan, one still 
> can't safely use unicode in mails, because so many MUAs or webmails just 
> don't support it.

What about saying that IRIs should not be used because RFC 3987 section 
1.2 item (a) says that this standard is not intended to apply to any 
protocol or format element unless those formats or protocols explicitly 
say that IRIs are supported?

- Sam Ruby

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 22:47:26 UTC