C14N 1.1 review concerns...

Dear XML Core WG,

I'm writing on behalf of the Internationalization Core WG, based no a 
minuted discussion here [0].

The Internationalization Core WG has examined Canonical XML 1.1 [1]. At 
present we do not object to your document's advancement, but our review 
has turned up some issues that we would like to clarify.

1. Unicode Normalization to Form C has been removed (except for the 
requirement that XPath/DataModel preparation involving transcoding from 
non-Unicode encodings to Unicode code points be normalizing). There is a 
citation of John Cowan's negative example but there is no health warning 
concerning the positive uses of normalization, which we would expect to see.

The I18N WG did have a long-standing position in the Character Model 
("CharMod") in support of early uniform normalization to Form C. 
However, this position is in the process of softening to a 
recommendation ("SHOULD" instead of "MUST"), see the current version of 
the normalization part [2]. While we think that removing the 
normalization requirement is an acceptable change to C14N, we're also 
concerned that users "won't know what they're missing".

2. The current document references xml:base and URI extensively. In 
particular, the document gives RFC 3986 as the definition of the term 
"URI". There is no mention whatsoever of IRI (RFC 3987) or of support 
for "LEIRI" inherent in xml:base. We think this is at least potentially 
confusing/misleading for implementers, and possibly harmful.

The reason it could be harmful is that C14N implementation might 
mistakenly have all of their IRIs escaped into being URIs, which is, we 
believe, a non-goal.

We would like to suggest that XML Core:

- review references to URI and consider referencing IRI in addition or 
instead of URI where appropriate
- insert clarifying text to ensure that it is clear that xml:base uses 
LEIRIs

Best Regards (for I18N Core),

Addison

[0] http://www.w3.org/2008/01/30-core-minutes.html#item04
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/PR-xml-c14n11-20080129/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-norm/

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2008 15:45:19 UTC