Re: Migration of HTTP to the use of IRIs [queryclarify-16]

Michel,

Thanks for this comment, but I think my point is still valid - even just for
presentational uses.

Given that many URI encodings exist 'in the wild' which use %HH escaping of
non-UTF-8 sequences, I fail to see how one can know that it is valid to convert
any such URI into an IRI (as per sect. 3.2) - even if just for presentational
purposes.

My concern is the same:  unless there is some kind of syntactic indicator within
the URI as a whole, how can one reliably know that UTF-8 has been used and that
it is intended to have a corresponding IRI?

It seems to me that IRI will only be deployed accurately and effectively if one
of the following situations occurs:

1) New protocol schemes (e.g. httpi, httpis ) are introduced which make it
explicit that this spec. applies to the URI,

2) They are used within a closed environment in which it is a convention that
only IRIs and IRI-derived URIs are in use (no legacy-encoding escapes, or they
are allowed to be mis-interpreted)

3) A new market-dominating user agent is launched which behaves as if (2) above
were the case - i.e. there is an attempt to establish IRIs as the de facto
default through market force, ignoring or discarding resulting errors of
presentation or of resource identification.

My big fear is that without rapid progress on (1), IRIs on the open Internet
will only ever take off if someone does (3) - which will be without benefit of
adequate standards backing.

I'd love to either:

a) be shown that my logic is faulty

or

b) be pleasantly surprised by being told that there _is_  RFC work taking place
on new schemes covering at least the space of http(s)

otherwise, I fail to understand how IRIs will 'take off' in the 'real world' -
where they are so badly needed.

Chris




----- Original Message -----
From: "Michel Suignard" <michelsu@windows.microsoft.com>
To: "Chris Haynes" <chris@harvington.org.uk>
Cc: <public-iri@w3.org>; "Martin Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 1:43 AM
Subject: RE: Migration of HTTP to the use of IRIs [queryclarify-16]



> From:  Chris Haynes
> Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 4:50 AM
>
> Actually, my original core concern has now been covered in your
section
> 1.2.a - Applicability, where you make it clear that "the intent is not
to
> introduce IRIs into contexts that are not defined to accept them".
>
> This now makes it clear that new schemas will be required to replace
> http: , https: etc. These will need to be self-identifying in some
way, so
> that receiving equipment will know that an IRI is being presented.
>
> So, as I commented last June, I await with interest the recognition
among
> those responsible for the HTTP schema that new schemas with new names
are
> required before IRIs can be used.

I'd like to comment on that. The IRI spec is fairly explicit on that IRI
can be used as presentation elements for URI protocol elements (ref
clause 3 intro). This is to recognize that applications out there have
not waited for us for creating presentation layers that use non ascii
native characters for schemes that supposedly should not use them (such
as http). The presentation layer principle is there to support that. So
I expect IRI to be used for both purposes:
- presentation layer for existing URI schemes
- core layer for new schemes exclusively defined using IRI for protocol
elements syntax.

For a while I'd expect the vast majority of IRI usage to be in the first
category.

Michel

Received on Friday, 7 May 2004 06:09:45 UTC