Re: Minutes from informal IETF/W3C meeting about HTML5 work

Just thinking out loud -- is it *really* a good idea to have separate  
URI and IRI lists?

Cheers,


On 31/03/2009, at 9:32 PM, Martin J. Dürst wrote:

> [copied to public-iri@w3.org, which should be used for all public  
> discussion related to IRIs]
>
> On 2009/03/30 18:08, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> Various folks from the IETF and W3C's HTML5 WG got together in San
>> Francisco last week to discuss the parts of that work.
>>
>> Rough minutes are at:
>> http://esw.w3.org/topic/IETF_HTML5_Meeting_March_2009
>
> From there:
>
> >>>>
> - HTML5's URI section (DanConnolly and Larry Masinter to work on this;
>  e.g. HTML WG action 68)
>  - We discussed IDN and URI/IRI (international domain names vs.
>    HTML5/W3C use of IRI). Changes to IRI would impact specs like Atom.
>    Larry advocated revising this spec, others were less enthusiastic.
>    It would be a big undertaking, and it wasn't clear that Martin
>    Dürst was available.
>  - Rob Sayre suggested the name "Hypertext References".
>    This was met with wide approval.
>  - Action Item: Dan to reformat the document as an Internet Draft
> >>>>
>
> Some comments:
>
> - My ability is limited, but not zero. Just recently, I had a major
>  blackout period due to upgrading of notebook/OS/emailer/... Not
>  quite out of it yet. (At least, I'm now able to write my name
>  correctly in email after all these years of working hard for
>  internationalization on the Web :-(.
>
> - I managed to absorb a major 'variant' of IRIs for the XML folks
>  under the name 'Legacy Extended IRIs'
>  (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-iri-bis-05#section-7).
>  Much of that text was originally from the XML side (thanks to
>  Norm Walsh, Richard Tobin, Henry Thomson), but I tweaked it quite
>  a bit for tone, and we went back and forth to try and make sure
>  we had all the differences covered.
>  I think the exercise was successful in the sense that it was
>  satisfactory for the parties involved (XML specs community and
>  IRI spec authorship), and paper (or these days electrons) is
>  patient anyway. I'm still not sure what kind of reaction there
>  will be from a wider community (hint, hint: feedback welcome!)
>
> - The motivation for doing the above were about as follows:
>  - It's better to have everything in place, so people can look it
>    up in one go.
>  - It's better to have it under the same name, and not send the
>    wrong message with names (the originally proposed name for
>    LEIRIs was "human readable identifiers", which was misleading
>    in many ways)
>  - It's better to allow it but warn against it than to ignore it
>    in silence.
>  - The IRI spec (some pre RFC 3987 drafts) allowed spaces and some
>    other strictly ASCII non-URI characters, which was the reason
>    they got allowed is some XML specs, so part of the reason was
>    that the IRI spec also bore some responsibility.
>
> - Last time I looked at the discrepancies between the URI/IRI
>  specs (RFC 3986/7) and the HTML practice (as far as documented),
>  my impression was that some parts of it could rather easily
>  be absorbed/buffered in the IRI spec, but for some others,
>  the URI spec would be more appropriate. As an example, I think
>  what HTML browsers do with buggy %-encoding sequences has
>  nothing to do with the first I in IRI, which stands for
>  Internationalization.
>
> So much for the moment.    Regards,     Martin.
>


--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 11:11:27 UTC