- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 08:49:22 PDT
- To: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- CC: "Alain LaBont/e'/" <alb@riq.qc.ca>, URI mailing list <uri@bunyip.com>
Martin, Perhaps you could mention in your draft about the use of identifiers with characters outside of ASCII that such use is actually problematic, and that some applications which use canonical identifiers and exact match as a way of doing symbol lookup when restricted to ASCII-only symbols might find that users of languages other than English will be ill-served by such a design; in some applications using a careful language-sensitive equivalence lookup (instead of exact-match) would make the software actually accomodate the needs and practices of such users. The mail in the recent week has been full of good examples of places where canonicalization is either ill-specified or context-sensitive, and "equivalence matching" would be far more practical. Fortunately, it's possible that equivalence-based matching could be deployed for URLs; other kinds of exact-match names will require a separate analysis. Both DNS and HTTP-servers (if not FTP servers) could be coaxed into doing equivalence-matching instead of exact matching for reference lookup; if they also respond with the server's view of the "canonical" name, then we won't be asking clients to do what it seems like is nearly impossible. Larry -- http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter
Received on Tuesday, 6 May 1997 11:50:35 UTC