scheme specific case normalization

A comment on
http://tools.ietf.org/html?draft=draft-hansen-2717bis-2718bis-uri-guidelines-07.txt


In RFC 3986 I read:

[[
  Some schemes define additional subcomponents that consist of case- 
insensitive data, giving an implicit license to normalizers to convert 
this data to a common case (e.g., all lowercase).
]]
page 42, section 6.2.3


It is helpful if "schemes with subcomponents  that consist of case- 
insensitive data" in their definition documents would specify that 
usually lowercase SHOULD be used. This is particularly pertinent in 
applications such as XML Namespaces and Semantic Web, where 
character-by-characters comparison is the norm, and unnormalized URIs 
result in false negatives.

Suggested text along the lines of
[[
When a scheme defines subcomponents that consist of case-insensitive 
data, then it SHOULD specify that implementations should accept 
uppercase letters as equivalent to lowercase for the sake of robustness 
but should only produce lowercase scheme names for consistency.
]]



Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 13:09:13 UTC