Re: IRIs and XLink/XPointer spec

At 1:19 AM -0500 12/6/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Martin Duerst scripsit:
>
>>  I would like to invite you to www-international@w3.org (a publicly
>>  archived list, crossposted) to express your input on why
>>  IRIs should include the above characters (<, >, {, }, |, \, ^, `,
>>  and SPACE), or to tell us that you would be fine with a change
>>  back to excluding these characters.
>
>Speaking for myself only, I'd like to see IRIs allowed to contain all of
>these directly except SPACE.  I think the issues with the others (ISO 646
>variants, bad EBCDIC translation tables) have more or less gone away now.
>
>Perhaps < and > should still be kept out for the sake of using them as
>delimiters; I don't feel strongly about it one way or the other.
>
>I think SPACE in IRIs (as opposed to %20) is a bogon, and shouldn't be
>allowed, the xpointer() scheme notwithstanding.  The other schemes do
>not require it.

I strongly agree with John on this issue, because. In the TEI we are 
seriously considering an option to perform all pointing with 
XPointers and URI fragments rather than the ID mechanism. This really 
depends on the need to escape spaces in URIs, because the best 
equivalent to IDREFS attributes is space delimited sets of URI 
references.

The use of the other characters as URI delimiters is pretty uncommon, 
but the same is not true for space.

   -- David
-- 

David G. Durand
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Received on Tuesday, 10 December 2002 18:20:37 UTC