RE: URI Templates: done or dead?

URIs are indeed "ASCII only". However... the point of templates, as I understand it, is to assemble URIs and portions of URIs dynamically, probably from runtime data.

Such data is *not* "ASCII only", since it can be anything. Roy is correct to point out that the result of running the template needs to be IRI-compatible in order to achieve this. That would be the "value" side of the "key-value" pairing.

However, my point is that the variable names themselves (the "key" side) are not necessarily restricted to "ASCII only" in real life... the programming language may be JS, perl, python, Java, etc., which permit non-ASCII variable names or keys. Similarly, SQL databases permit non-ASCII values for field names, etc. in their schemas. And so forth. Just because all of the examples that immediately occur to the authors are limited to ASCII ("email", "userid") does not mean that this is globally true, and not allowing for these non-ASCII-named variables could result in non-interoperable ways of dealing with the encoding issues involved.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@ccil.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 3:10 PM
> To: Phillips, Addison
> Cc: Roy T. Fielding; Mark Nottingham; URI; Joe Gregorio; David
> Orchard; Marc Hadley
> Subject: Re: URI Templates: done or dead?
> 
> Phillips, Addison scripsit:
> 
> > We have pretty good knowledge of what makes a good Unicode
> > identifier. If we're going to assign variable names in a new
> pattern
> > language, why are we limiting it to alphanum? The software we are
> > linking to (the part generating the variables that get
> substituted in)
> > may not--indeed probably does not--have that same limitation.
> 
> Given that URIs are ASCII-only, I think it is sufficient to have
> identifiers be ASCII-only too.
> 
> --
> You know, you haven't stopped talking           John Cowan
> since I came here. You must have been
> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

> vaccinated with a phonograph needle.            cowan@ccil.org
>         --Rufus T. Firefly

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2008 22:24:53 UTC