Re: Updating the IRI spec to include "web addresses"

On 2009/06/03 4:01, Dan Connolly wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-05-31 at 10:12 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> No, it's a sequence of characters _plus_ another character encoding.

I was also thinking that it's possible to describe it that way.
Probably Larry has to try out which one works better, based on your 
text. One problem with the above definition is that there may be some 
edge cases where the two ways of defining things, when followed to the 
letter by implementations, would not given exactly the same result.

The cases to look for here would be cases where the initial conversion 
from bytes to characters (implemented customarily these days as a 
conversion to Unicode) and the later back-conversion from characters to 
bytes for the query part would not roundtrip cleanly.

I can't just now come up off the top of my head with a case that it 
would be worth to try on some browsers, but that doesn't mean there 
couldn't be one. Another way of checking this might be to look at some 
implementations, or check with the browser people.

Also, I'm not sure it's relevant, as the abstract description of bytes 
and characters may be done without explicitly specifying where encoding 
conversions have to take place.

Regards,    Martin.


>> 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
>

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 11:31:18 UTC