RE: IRI

I think one good solution would be to do something similar to what's
done for URIs. There, we have the following text:

>>>>
Currently Web addresses are typically expressed using Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs. The URI syntax defined in RFC 3986 STD 66 (Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax) essentially restricts Web addresses to a small number of characters: basically, just upper and lower case letters of the English alphabet, European numerals and a small number of symbols.
>>>>

At the start of "basic concepts", we could then say something similar,
e.g. something along the lines of (borrowing some text from Mark):

>>>>
To allow Web addresses to use characters from a wide range of scripts,
you have to use Internationalized Resource Identifiers or IRIs.
IRIs are defined in RFC 3987, and allow to use characters from the
Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646); that lets them use Chinese characters, Russian (Cyrillic) characters, Arabic characters, and so on.
For IRIs to work, there are four main requirements:
>>>>

I have recently given this article to a student as part of the material
to prepare for a talk about URIs and IRIs. He also had difficulties
understanding, at each place in the article, what was being talked
about, or why.

I think having the "four main requirements for IRIs to work" in the
document is very good, but having it very early, and in a section
entitled "basic concepts", is quite confusing. I would suggest moving
that discussion a bit (or even quite a bit) farther down, and move
some more of the really basic explanations higher up. I think the
document currently tries to use the "four main requirements" as
a started for explaining details such as punycode and %-encoding,
but I think there are easier ways to introduce these.

Regards,    Martin.

At 01:22 08/12/09, Richard Ishida wrote:
>Hmm.ツ  That's a definition I came to as a result of discussion with Martin.ツ  The definition in the IRI spec is " An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646)."
> 
>What did you have in mind (bearing in mind the audience of this document is " content authors, Web project managers, and general users who want to get a basic overview, without getting bogged down in gory technical details, of what happens behind the scenes when they use non-ASCII characters in web addresses ")?
> 
>Cheers,
>RI
> 
>============
>Richard Ishida
>Internationalization Lead
>W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
>
><http://www.w3.org/International/>http://www.w3.org/International/
>http://rishida.net/
>
> 
>From: mark.edward.davis@gmail.com [mailto:mark.edward.davis@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mark Davis
>Sent: 04 December 2008 06:28
>To: Phillips, Addison
>Cc: ishida@w3.org; Felix Sasaki; public-i18n-core@w3.org
>Subject: Re: IRI
> 
>I think I put it a bit too forcefully, but I find that the definitional sentence:
> 
>We will refer to Web addresses that allow the use of characters from a wide range of scripts as Internationalized Resource Identifiers or IRIs
>
> 
>only gives a vague notion of what an IRI is. Then it plunges into what applications and protocols need to do to support it.
> 
>Mark
>
>On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 21:37, Phillips, Addison <<mailto:addison@amazon.com>addison@amazon.com> wrote:
>
>Do you mean in the intended audience section? The first occurrence of IRI in the article proper is just after the full spell-out. Still, the audience section does use some undefined TLAs.
>
> 
>
>Addison
>
> 
>
>Addison Phillips
>
>Globalization Architect -- Lab126
>
> 
>
>Internationalization is not a feature.
>
>It is an architecture.
>
> 
>
>From: <mailto:public-i18n-core-request@w3.org>public-i18n-core-request@w3.org [mailto:public-i18n-core-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Mark Davis
>Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 3:31 PM
>To: <mailto:ishida@w3.org>ishida@w3.org; Felix Sasaki
>Cc: <mailto:public-i18n-core@w3.org>public-i18n-core@w3.org
>Subject: IRI
>
> 
>
><http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/>http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/
>
> 
>
>I noticed that IRI is used before it is defined.
>
> 
>
>Mark
> 


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

Received on Tuesday, 9 December 2008 02:45:11 UTC