Charmod conformance

I note that the second last call character model doc has just been
published:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-charmod-20010928/

This "provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content
developers a common reference for interoperable text manipulation " in
particular relating to "string identity matching" and "URI conventions".

Moreover it shows where the I18N WG are coming from, and their comments on
our WD (particularly at last call) will be influenced by this thinking.

In relationship to "string identity matching" they show how two different
unicode strings may represent the very same logical entity that gets
displayed identically to the user. They recommend a model of "early uniform
normalization" in order to avoid the resulting problems. Basically this
model is that it is the document writer's problem, not that of the document
processing application, which should use binary compare.

With regards to URI convention they recommend allowing international uris
and they specify a conversion algorithm in order to make them RFC2396
conformant.

My belief is that charmod conformance is non-onerous for software aimed at
north american and western european users, whilst for software aimed at
users who genuinely suffer from the problems that charmod addresses I
believe that writing our specs so that they are charmod conformant will be a
significant help.

I propose two charmod issues to be added to the issues list:

  charmod-literals
  ================
         Does the treatment of RDF Literals in the Model Theory
         and the RDF/XML syntax confrom with charmod.
         What does NTriple have to do?

and

  charmod-uri
  ===========
         Does the treatment of uri-references in the
         RDF/XML syntax conform with charmod?
         Does the treatment of property nodes and typed
         nodes conform with charmod?
         What does the model have to do?
         What does NTriple have to do?


[Those question phrased "Does the ..." indicate my prejudice that we should
conform, whereas those phrased "What does ..." indicate my prejudice that we
should not conform, but need to make a reasoned defence of that decision.]

Jeremy

Received on Monday, 1 October 2001 13:58:18 UTC