RE: Comments on "Guidelines and Registration Procedures for new URI Schemes"

At 9:27 AM -0700 9/6/05, Addison Phillips wrote:
>
>But the URI scheme registry is at a lower level of standardization than even IRI is at, no?

The current proposal is that the registry document be a BCP, which is somewhat outside
the proposed-draft-full stairstep.  As you know, that gets complicated, but "lower level of
standardization" doesn't sound right.

>And new URI schemes should really consider IRI ramifications.

I believe that the draft does ask them to consider IRI ramifications.

>What would the reason be for allowing *new* URI schemes to be registered that allow (or require!) IRI-incompatible mappings from character strings to URI?

How could this happen?  All URIs are IRIs.  If they have specified a mapping from character
strings to URIs that is valid, it is automatically valid as an IRI.  

>The draft in question raises the issue of character encodings. It just doesn't consistently cite IRI as a resource for mapping text to URI. We think that promoting adoption of URI schemes that are wholly compatible with IRI is a good thing and one way to help ensure this would be by (more strongly) recommending the use of UTF-8 via 3987 Section 3.1.

<snip>

>
>Again, we don't think this is what we're requesting. What we're saying is, effectively: if you wish to register a new URI scheme then you really should make it compatible with IRI. URI, for very good technical and historical reasons, does not mandate anything in relation to IRI. But we don't think there is a reason not to recommend that new URI schemes adopt RFC 3987 as the process for mapping characters to URIs (and think there are very good reasons, on the contrary, to actively recommend it).

The problem we're facing, though, is that every effort in the past to be prescriptive about
URI schemes during the registration process has resulted in folks minting URI schemes
without registration.  Some of those turned out to be in conflict, and some not really
valid URIs.  Trying to get this down to a process that folks will actually use
and which will actually result in syntactically valid URIs is the key goal (at least for
me, personally).  Making folks aware of the IRI work and that there are parts of it
they may re-use makes lots of sense to me; there will likely be schemes
registered by folks who weren't aware of it.  But I'm very reluctant to strengthen this:

>[3] Sec. 2.6, you write: "URI scheme definitions SHOULD be compatible with that specification.".
>It would be good to have a MUST here.

If folks wish to register syntactically valid URI schemes that don't meet that MUST, I think
we need to let them.  the IRI  documents make clear that those can be treated as IRIs, and
any effort to force further compliance seems likely to get us back to the previous problem.
Certainly, they should be give the pointers and asked to consider it, but if they still say
"no", I don't think using the registration mechanism to seek compliance will succeed.  It
has not, I believe, so far.

Just my personal opinion,
			regards,
				Ted Hardie

Received on Tuesday, 6 September 2005 17:57:00 UTC