Official Response to ISSUE-114 from RDF Web Apps WG

Hi Gregg,

Thank you for your public feedback on the RDFa 1.1 documents. This is an
official response from the RDF Web Apps WG to your issue before we enter
the 3rd Last Call for the RDFa 1.1 work this coming Tuesday. The Last
Call will last for 3 weeks, so there is still time for you to discuss
your concerns if we have not fully addressed them.

Your issue was tracked here:

ISSUE-114: HTML5 content model for @href/@src coerces values to URLs
https://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/track/issues/114

Explanation of Issue
--------------------

HTML5 has DOM access rules for accessing @href/@src values (in addition
to others) in "Resolve URLs":

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#resolve-a-url

The effect of these is to both require that relative URLs take into
consideration xml:base, and that IRI paths are turned into URIs using
percent encoding. (Note xml:base is not allowed in HTML5 docs, but it
would be in XHTML5).

Step 6 normalizes any _host_ component to UTF-8 and then performs a IDNA
ToASCII algorithm:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490#page-10

Step 7 normalizes any _path_ component that is not ASCII with the
percent-encoded equivalent.

The result of both these steps is that IRIs may be converted to URIs.
This means that @href and @src may not safely be used with IRIs that are
not URIs. There is no such requirement on DOM access for @about, @typeof
or @resource, so these may safely be used for representing IRIs, but may
have different relative-IRI resolution algorithms imposed.

Working Group Decision
----------------------

RESOLVED: Place a note in the HTML+RDFa specification notifying authors
that IRIs placed into @href, @src and @data could be transformed if
access via the DOM.

http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-12-08#resolution_1

Feedback
--------

Since this is an official Working Group response to your issue, we would
appreciate it if you responded to this e-mail and let us know if the
decision made by the group is acceptable to you as soon as possible.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm vs. OpenTransact Shootout
http://manu.sporny.org/2011/web-payments-comparison/

Received on Saturday, 28 January 2012 17:58:06 UTC