Clarification of charmod-uri

I am not (yet) planning to protest the decision we made about unicode
strings in URIs, but I would like some clarification.

1) Is there some reason why these Unicode characters cannot be %encoded? I
thought someone said something to this effect on the telecon, but I didn't
catch it. If not, what's the rationale for insisting on a
backwards-incompatible change, when the (comparatively) backwards-compatible
%encoding works just as well?

2) Am I correct in saying that this means that RDF will no longer be using
URI-refs to identify Resources? Is this consistent with our charter?

3) Does this mean we will allow other characters like %20 (space) into our
URIs that have traditionally been %encoded? If not, how do we decide what's
allowed and what isn't?

4) Which spec is going to describe these new identifiers? The IRI spec[1]
seems to have fifteen rather complex but relevant pages on them. Can we
afford the extra time it may take to integrate these and review them?

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/2001/draft-masinter-url-i18n-08.txt

All the best,
-- 
[ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ]

Received on Sunday, 28 April 2002 15:08:11 UTC