Minor comments on Widgets

Hello Webapps WG,

(these are personal comments)

I happened to be referring to the Widget spec this morning and noticed a few minor items that I feel should be brought to your attention. 

1. Section 5.3 (Zip Relative Paths). The ABNF defines "language-range". I think this is not desirable. Language ranges are input to the matching algorithm (i.e. the user's request). You don't really want paths like "locale/de-*-1901". You want concrete paths here and "*" has no business in a path. Ideally you would reference the "Language-Tag" production in BCP 47 (RFC 5646). However, since it is a large production and you don't probably want to directly incorporate it, you could incorporate the "obs-language-tag" production in the same document instead. You should still say that language tags used in paths "must" be valid language tags according to the more formal production.

2. Section 5.3. The same production corresponds to BCP 47 (RFC 4647) "extended-language-range", although it only allows the tags to use lowercase letters. I really feel that mixed case is not that difficult to support and that it will save many developers from inexplicable silent failures.

3. There is no mention of case sensitivity of filenames anywhere that I can find. You should define if filenames are case sensitive (or not) and what is meant by "case sensitive" if it is supported (just ASCII case? Unicode default case mapping?)

Thanks,

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N, IETF IRI WGs)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

Received on Tuesday, 15 March 2011 15:42:41 UTC