Re: Was mandating WebIDs be IRIs ever discussed (as opposed to them 'just' being URIs)?

On Mon, Jun 27, 2022 at 4:53 PM Pat McBennett <patm@inrupt.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just wanted to first ask if anyone here knew of any existing discussions
> at all (either here in this mailing list (as I can't find anything directly
> relevant when I search this list for 'IRI'), or anywhere else public) on
> updating the current statement in the draft spec [1] (i.e., ""A WebID is an
> HTTP URI") to use the term IRI instead of URI?
>

Dont think it's come up.  May be some phishing attacks associated with
similarly encoded names/identities


>
> (Note: I'm very deliberately not even mentioning the term HTTP in that
> definition - as that is a completely separate discussion point (i.e.,
> getting into DIDs and IPFS, etc.))
>
> I don't pretend to know the history behind efforts to definitively define
> what an IRI is - but I understand that IETF 3987 [2] never actually became
> an official standard (or did it?).
>
> I understand that the whole area of clearly defining what we mean by URL,
> URI, or IRI is probably still a mess. This was brilliantly articulated back
> in 2016 in this blog entry [3] by the maintainer of cURL (Daniel Stenberg):
> "Not even curl follows any published spec very closely these days...There’s
> no unified URL standard and there’s no work in progress towards that. I
> don’t count WHATWG’s spec as a real effort either".
>
> The reason I ask this question at all is because the RDF 1.1 Concepts and
> Abstract Syntax makes it explicitly clear that all identifiers in RDF are
> IRIs (as defined by IETF 3987, so whether that is an official standard or
> not), and it's clear from section "3.2 IRIs" that the reason for RDF
> explicitly stating the use of IETF 3987 IRIs over URIs is:
>   "IRIs are a generalization of URIs [RFC3986] that permits a wider range
> of Unicode characters."
>
> Therefore I interpret that as saying that RDF mandates IRIs so as to be as
> inclusive as possible of character sets to allow people from all around the
> world to use their native languages to mint identifiers. (Seems like quite
> a laudable intent to me!)
>
> So my question, simply re-stated, is: has anyone discussed the idea of
> mandating WebIDs be IRIs too, for the same reason - i.e., to explicitly be
> as inclusive as possible of global character sets?
>
> (Seems to me like WebID has *even more* reason to be explicitly inclusive
> of character sets for identifiers than RDF even, since WebIDs are expressly
> intended to identify people (as well as organizations, and IoT devices, and
> 'agents', etc.))
>
> Cheers,
>
> Pat.
>
> 1 -
> https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/#:~:text=a%20given%20Server.-,WebID,A%20WebID%20is%20a%20URI%20with%20an%20HTTP%20or%20HTTPS%20scheme,-which%20denotes%20an
> 2 - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt
> 3 - https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/11/my-url-isnt-your-url/
>
> *Pat McBennett*, Technical Architect
>
> Contact  | patm@inrupt.com
>
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