Re: Comment on draft-hoffman-file-uri-03.txt

Martin Duerst wrote:
> Hello Paul, Ted, others,
> 
> Here is a comment regarding
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-file-uri-03.txt
> 
> This draft is listed as AD Evaluation::AD Followup at
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_id&dTag=12228&rfc_flag=0

I am under the impression that Paul Hoffman washed his hands of it after the 
comments and disagreement over how prescriptive the spec should be became 
overwhelming, and then Larry Masinter offered to take it over.

To get over the too-hard-to-comment, too-many-comments, too-many-approaches 
hurdles, Larry, Graham Klyne and I discussed using a wiki to manage the 
initial stages of a new draft. The idea would be to let interested parties 
make edits directly until a reasonable degree of consensus/stability was 
reached, and then an editor (Larry probably) would take it over and submit
a clean version as an Internet-Draft or RFC.

I got the wiki set up 2 months ago but before making it public I wanted to 
seed it with a nice index of prior discussion from the list as well as links 
to all the relevant odds & ends relating to 'file' URIs and the IETF's 
"document what works moreso than fix what's broken" philosophy. However, I've 
been pretty busy and haven't gotten as far as I wanted with it. On top of 
that, I recently discovered that I managed to lose my MySQL database password 
and can't seem to reset it with the usual means of doing so, so I put it off 
until I could devote a day to all things URI.

Most of your comments seem to repeat some of the same issues that I brought up 
on the list on July 13, 2004. I like your proposed text, though:

>  >>>>>>>>
> 3.4  Character sets and encodings
> 
>     Local file systems use all kinds of specific encodings, and sometimes
>     many different encodings, for representing file and directory names.
>     For interoperability, it is preferable for file: URIs to use UTF-8
>     [STD63] (percent-encoded when necessary) in accordance with Section
>     2.5 of [RFC3986] and for compatibility with IRIs [RFC3987].
>     Applications creating file: URIs should transcode file and directory
>     names to UTF-8. Applications interpreting file: URIs should transcode
>     back to the encoding(s) used by the file system. For file systems where
>     the encoding used cannot be determined with reasonable reliability,
>     the actual byte values used by the file system may have to be directly
>     encoded in the file: URI.
>  >>>>>>>>
> 
> I can provide some more text talking about specific systems.
> 

In response to a comment I left on IEBlog, I got an email from the Internet 
Explorer program manager at Microsoft. He mentioned someone on his team who is 
an expert (the person who posted this: 
http://blogs.msdn.com/freeassociations/archive/2005/05/19/420059.aspx ) and he 
said he'd forward any questions we have to the CURI team. So that sounds 
promising. Maybe we can finally get some info on how UNC paths and non-ASCII 
paths are mapped to and from URIs on Windows, and what kind of normalization 
goes on in the Address Bar widgets.

Mike

Received on Thursday, 18 August 2005 09:38:35 UTC