IRIs - more on space

(Background: I am just drafting proposed modifications to text in RDF concepts 
WD to address the problem of control characters in RDF URI references - i.e. 
proto-IRIs)


I have just been looking at IRI draft 4 
http://www.w3.org/International/iri-edit/draft-duerst-iri-04.txt
(June 2003 expires December 2003)

and find:

[[
   Note: Earlier drafts of this specification allowed the space
   character and various delimiters in IRIs and IRI references.  The
   full list of these characters was: "<", ">", '"', Space, "{", "}",
   "|", "\", "^", and "`", i.e.  all printable characters in US-ASCII
   that are not allowed in URIs.  For backwards compatibility,
   implementations MAY also include these characters in step 3) above.
   If such characters are found but are not converted, then the
   conversion SHOULD fail.  Please note that the number sign ("#"), the
   percent sign ("%"), and the square bracket characters ("[", "]") are
   not part of the above list, and MUST not be converted.  Protocols and
   formats that have used earlier definitions of IRIs including these
   characters MAY require unescaping of these characters as a
   preprocessing step to extract the actual IRI from a given field.
   Such preprocessing MAY also be used by applications allowing the user
   to enter an IRI.
]]

i.e. it is not only space but a load of other things that got excluded.
The current text in RDF is based on the xlink text that shares a mindset with 
the earlier versions of IRI-draft.

My understanding is that the rules were changed after community feedback.

Thus I am not inclined to have text that deals with space only, and this long 
list crosses my pain threshold ...
Also IRI-draft-4 differs substantively from the Namespaces 1.1 rules :(

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 04:47:39 UTC