Re: Advice on making IRI document suitable for reference by HTML (and other specs)

On Dec 31, 2009, at 8:10 AM, Erik van der Poel wrote:

>> I told you before, the solution to this problem is to not use
>> the same term for both the input and output of the algorithm.
> 
> I agree that the input and output are important. For better
> interoperability, two implementations, when given the same input,
> should produce the same output(s).

That is not what interoperability means.

> When the input is an HTML <a
> href="http://...">, there are several possible outputs, depending on
> further inputs such as mouse clicks and JavaScript:
> 
> DNS NAME
> TCP Destination Port
> HTTP Request-URI, Host
> DOM HTMLAnchorElement href, protocol, host, hostname, port, pathname,
> search, hash
> Browser URL field, status bar
> Search Engine href, display URL
> 
> Since the IRIbis work is likely to take a long time, my recommendation
> would be for the HTML5 drafts and "final" spec to always have a
> complete set of rules and recommendations for URL processing, with
> references to other drafts/specs such as URI, IRI, IRIbis, HTTP,
> HTTPbis, and DOM, as appropriate. It may be that some HTML
> implementation behavior details can eventually be pushed down to
> IRIbis or even URIbis, but there is no need to wait for those working
> groups to reach rough consensus. (Of course, the HTML WG might take
> long to reach consensus too. :-)

That is not even an option.  The options are to (a) fix HTML5 so that it
only defines what is needed for HTML and defers to the relevant (and
far more standard) specifications for the output; (b) fix IRIbis so that
it defines what is sufficient for HTML5 and replace all such definitions
in HTML5 with pointers to IRIbis; or, (c) terminate HTML5 as a standards
effort.

> Now the terminology. "Web reference" doesn't quite seem right since
> FTP and SMTP predate the Web. I think terms like URL, absolute URL and
> relative URL are fine. We just need to remember (and document) that
> the rules and recommendations are different, depending on the context
> (e.g. HTML href vs rel, producer vs consumer).

The World Wide Web has always included ftp and mailto references.
They are part of the Web and their references are Web references.

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 31 December 2009 20:04:19 UTC