Re: Browser bars, etc.

--On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 20:09 +0200 Julian Reschke
<julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:

> On 2012-07-10 20:02, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> ...
>> It seems to me that a browser does not need to present the
>> "raw" URI in the address bar, and ought to display
>> hex-encoded characters there in a
> 
> s/characters/octets/
> 
> This is part of the problem :-)

Yes, especially with UTF-8.  And that is why I've been arguing
for some years that the move from ISO 8859-1-friendly %hex
encoding of octets to the basically user-hostile hex encoding of
UTF-8 octets was a mistake that should not be propagated into
something that is explicitly concerned with i18n.  Note that,
with %hex octet encoding of UTF-8, the typical user can't even
tell where one character ends and another begins.  \u(NNNN) and
its variations isn't really user-friendly either, but at least
it is about characters and can be mapped to a character (Unicode
code point) by a single-stage lookup that doesn't require
special programming.

>> user-friendly manner. So I don't think that IRI vs. URI is
>> all that relevant for the address bar, whereas it's more
>> relevant for activities like authoring HTML documents.
> 
> People paste from the address bar into href attributes. So
> whatever works in the browser *will* end up in HTML documents.

Yes.  But, to the extent that is true and _all_ HTML
implementations don't support IRIs in href arguments, Dave's
assertion about IRI display in the address bar that started this
thread leads to a failure condition.  

Again, I think the conclusion is that we need to do some careful
rethinking here in a process that doesn't necessarily favor
either of the present IRI or SIR ideas.

best,
   john

Received on Tuesday, 10 July 2012 18:21:34 UTC