Confusing use of "URI" to refer to IRIs, and IRI handling in the DOM

Section 1.4 says "For readability, the term URI is used to refer to both ASCII URIs and Unicode IRIs, as those terms are defined by RFC 3986 and RFC 3987 respectively. On the rare occasions where IRIs are not allowed but ASCII URIs are, this is called out explicitly."

First, this policy isn't followed in the document; there are many places in the document where the phrase "URI (or IRI)" is used. Secondly, this is backwards and confusing, because every URI is an IRI, but not every IRI is a URI.

Instead, the term "IRI" should be used throughout, except where only URIs are allowed. In addition, whenever non-URI IRIs are forbidden, there should be an explanation of why they are forbidden.

The DOM "interfaces for URI [sic] manipulation" in section 4.13 should be amended to provide a mechanism for converting between IRIs and URIs. Also, some description of how the DOM interfaces deal with IRIs is needed. In particular, can I pass an IRI directly to XMLHTTPRequest.open(), or do I need to convert it to a URI (URL) first?

Regards,
Brian

Received on Thursday, 13 March 2008 15:32:16 UTC