IRIs and XPointer

I have recently been reading the latest IRI draft, and was interested to note 
a divergence between it and the xpointer recommendation.

This is a comment on the following two documents:

XPtr:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-xptr-framework-20030325/

IRI
http://www.w3.org/International/iri-edit/draft-duerst-iri-04.txt
(June 2003 expires December 2003)

IRI:
[[
   Note: Earlier drafts of this specification allowed the space
   character and various delimiters in IRIs and IRI references.  The
   full list of these characters was: "<", ">", '"', Space, "{", "}",
   "|", "\", "^", and "`", i.e.  all printable characters in US-ASCII
   that are not allowed in URIs.  For backwards compatibility,
   implementations MAY also include these characters in step 3) above.
   If such characters are found but are not converted, then the
   conversion SHOULD fail.  Please note that the number sign ("#"), the
   percent sign ("%"), and the square bracket characters ("[", "]") are
   not part of the above list, and MUST not be converted.  Protocols and
   formats that have used earlier definitions of IRIs including these
   characters MAY require unescaping of these characters as a
   preprocessing step to extract the actual IRI from a given field.
   Such preprocessing MAY also be used by applications allowing the user
   to enter an IRI.
]]

Xptr:
[[
B. Pointer in IRI reference
#xpointer(string-range(//P,"my favorite smiley :-^)"))
]] 

The example B includes space and the delimiter ^ ...

this appears to be a mismatch.

BTW I support the changes in the IRI draft mentioned in this note, which I 
understand to have been made in response to comments on the earlier drafts.

Jeremy Carroll

Received on Monday, 22 September 2003 06:19:05 UTC