Re: Proposed Charter and Agenda for IRI BOF at IETF 76

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> ...
> I don't see a great advantage in splitting the specs, as this makes 
> cross-references more complicated. If it were just a matter of 
> transforming the kind of string that may appear in an "href" attribute 
> into a valid IRI, then your proposal might be plausible. However, in 
> addition to converting to a URI, HTML UAs also need to be able to do the 
> following to resource identifiers treated with lenient processing: (a) 
> separate into components, even when the string is not a valid URI or 
> IRI, and in a way that is not necessarily equivalent to first converting 
> to a valid IRI or URI; (b) resolve a reference relative to a base when 
> either the reference or the base might not be a valid URI or IRI; (c) 
> determine if a reference is "absolute" even if it might not be a valid 
> URI or IRI. That would mean a great deal of algorithms defined in a 
> totally separate place from the URI spec. This is what the Web Address 
> spec[1] attempted to do, and it ends up duplicating a lot of concepts 
> from IRI/URI. This effort was set aside in favor of IRIbis incorporating 
> the necessary content.
> ...

a) As already mentioned in this thread, it appears this is covered by 
the text in <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#appendix-B>.

b) Could you remind us why it's not possible to translate both to valid 
URI/IRI and references first and then use the standard behavior?

c) Again, see <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#appendix-B>.

I do realize that a more normative way of what Appendix B says may be 
needed, but please let's not dismiss what's already in the spec as unusable.

BR, Julian

Received on Sunday, 27 September 2009 06:51:42 UTC