Re: draft-duerst-iri-07.txt: 2 week mailing list last call

At 14:02 04/05/12 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:

>At 18:05 12/05/04 +0900, Martin Duerst wrote:
>>Hello Graham,
>>
>>I have marked this as issue 5.2resolve-32.
>>
>>At 12:02 04/05/10 +0100, Graham Klyne wrote:
>>
>>>Section 5.2:
>>>
>>>The MUST in the second paragraph seems to be straying inappropriately 
>>>into application design territory.
>>
>>Sorry, but I don't think so. If different applications resolve
>>in different ways, that would be a very bad idea.
>
>I agree that would not be good.  I think the "MUST" in the first paragraph 
>addresses this.  I was referring to the "MUST" in the second paragraph:
>[[
>For comparison, such conversions MUST only
>be done on the fly, while retaining the original IRI.
>]]

Okay, sorry for the confusion. So we are looking at the following text:

    If this kind of equivalence is to be tested, the percent-encoding of
    both IRIs to be compared has to be aligned, for example by converting
    both IRIs to URIs (see Section 3.1) and making sure that the case of
    the hexadecimal characters in the percent-encode is always the same
    (preferably upper case). For comparison, such conversions MUST only
    be done on the fly, while retaining the original IRI.

I have noticed that this again assumes that there are no escaping issues
with URIs, which is not true. I have therefore changed it to:

    If this kind of equivalence is to be tested, the percent-encoding of
    both IRIs to be compared has to be aligned, for example by converting
    both IRIs to URIs (see Section 3.1), *eliminating escape
    differences in the resulting URIs,* and making sure that the case of
    the hexadecimal characters in the percent-encode is always the same
    (preferably upper case). For comparison, such conversions MUST only
    be done on the fly, while retaining the original IRI.


Coming back to your original point, I have reworded

    For comparison, such conversions MUST only be done on the fly,
    while retaining the original IRI.

to

    In order to conserve the original IRIs, such conversions SHOULD
    only be done on the fly, while retaining the IRIs.

The main goal here is to make clear to implementers that they shouldn't
just convert everything to URIs and stay there, because then the whole
point of IRIs would be lost. So to some extent, you may call this "straying 
into application design territory", but to some extent, it's just a
consequence of actually using IRIs. I have changed the MUST to a SHOULD,
because I think that's more appropriate.

Regards,     Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2004 23:09:17 UTC