RE: Fwd: Re: HRRIs, IRIs, etc

Hello Paul, others,

Many thanks for your detailled comments.

At 22:55 07/06/20, Grosso, Paul wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, 2007 June 19 20:24
>> To: Grosso, Paul
>> Cc: public-iri@w3.org; Richard Ishida; Felix Sasaki; 
>> www-xml-linking-comments@w3.org; public-xml-core-wg@w3.org; 
>> public-i18n-core@w3.org
>> Subject: RE: Fwd: Re: HRRIs, IRIs, etc
>> 
>> Hello Paul, others,
>
>> 
>> Not only have these concerns not yet been adressed, but also do I not
>> remember having received any kind of reply on these issues.
>> 
>> Looking forward to hear from you again.
>> 
>> Regards,     Martin.
>
>Martin,
>
>Thank you for your detailed comments.
>
>I think you may have sent some private email in the
>past that never made it to the WG's attention.
>
>The only email I see from you in the archive is
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2007AprJun/
>0000
>which doesn't mention any of the issues you remind us
>of above, hence our apparent lack of response to you.

My comments originally were private. Norm asked me to make
them public, and I did so, and he said he would try to make
sure your group knew about them.


>Because the XLink 1.1 and XML Base PER are both on hold
>for this issue, and because we were just pulling out the
>definition already in XML, XLink, and other specs and
>putting it into this RFC, we were hoping to to this in
>an expeditious manner.

I very much understand that you don't want to spend more
time than necessary. But please believe me, publishing
something as an RFC is bound to take time.

>I'm not sure how the IRI spec and the words in the XLink
>spec (which we were attempting to copy into this HRRI 
>spec) ended up so out of sync given that we thought what
>we put in the XLink spec was a copy of what was in the
>IRI spec (before the IRI spec was officially available),
>so I'm somewhat surprised by your long list of issues.

You can find some analisys of that in the first half of
http://www.w3.org/mid/6.0.0.20.2.20070530103108.050daec0@localhost

Simply speaking, input from the IETF on this issue was
rather strong, and I tried to make sure that XLink and
friends were accomodated in some way.

>We don't want to rush out something that is wrong or
>confusing.  We thought issuing an RFC to define HRRIs
>(or whatever you want to call these things) was the
>easiest and best route.  If that isn't going to work,
>we may fall back to defining them in a W3C Note or in
>a separate mini-Rec or something else,

In terms of "time to publication", that would probably
be the fastest. However, unless very carefully written,
it wouldn't address one of my main comment (fragmentation).

>but for the time
>being, we will review your comments and try to figure
>out where to go from here.

Thanks a lot.

Here are two more comments:

1. (already mentioned in the mail referenced above, and
   not the job of the XML Core WG, but a job that I think
   has to be done): What other (W3C) specs have 'circumscriptions'
   of what's now called IRI? Are there other syntax variants
   around? How have other specs managed (or not) to move
   from circumscriptions to a reference to the IRI spec?

2. I think I got the syntactic differences resulting from
   the IRI syntax correct in my last mail, but there are
   some more restrictions in section 4 (Bidi). In particular,
   there is "IRIs MUST NOT contain bidirectional formatting characters
   (LRM, RLM, LRE, RLE, LRO, RLO, and PDF)." There are
   other restrictions, but they are shoulds, not musts.

Number 2 above is a good example for understanding some of the
differences: The general idea of IRIs was easy to put down,
but as I guess you all know from lots of experience, things
can get more complicated when looked at closely. The area of
bidirectional IRIs is something that took a long time to
work out. It would have been rather infeasible to add this
to the XML or XLink specification, and it is clear that
we would have no chance of getting this reasonably well
baked if we had given it a shot. The result in the IRI spec,
as far as I understand, it the best solution that we could
possibly come up with given all the constraints we had to
work with.

It's up to the XML community to decide whether they want to
accept this conclusion wholeheartedly (maybe resulting in a
normative change) or to find a way to 'fudge' things
(hopefully making sure that they at least recommend against
e.g. bidi formatting characters). But it would be a pity to
simply ignore the work that has been done on this (and other)
issues, and the input from the IETF community.

Regards,    Martin.


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

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 10:40:40 UTC