Re: New article for REVIEW: An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses

 A few remarks.

1) The article mentions "URI" without expliciting the acronym, just 
equating it to "multilingual Web address".

2) Later, the article switches to "IRI", and does not explain the 
difference between URI and IRI, if any.  Confusing.

3) Here is an example of using URI and IRI as interchangeable in the same 
sentence:
"The user clicks on a hyperlink or enters the URI in the address bar of a 
user agent. At this point the IRI contains non-ASCII characters that could 
be in any character encoding."
More confusion!

4) The expression "user friendly for humans" is a bit redundant (unless 
the "I" in "IRI" stands for Intergalactic :-).

5) I would change 
"it is converted to Unicode, using the UTF-8 encoding, and normalized 
using Unicode Normalization Form C."
to
"it is converted to Unicode, normalized using Unicode Normalization Form C 
and encoded using the UTF-8 encoding."

6) You write "If the string is already in Unicode, it is not changed in 
any way. Otherwise, ..."
This implies that a string already in Unicode will not be normalized.  Is 
that true?
It also implies that if the string is encoded as UTF-16, it will not be 
converted to UTF-8.  Is it so?

7) On my system (MS IE under WinXP with Hebrew locale, no Japanese fonts 
installed), all the Japanese characters in the examples are displayed as 
small rectangles.  Since the article is meant for a large audience, most 
of which does not have Japanese fonts, it might be better to pack the 
examples as images.

Shalom (Regards),  Mati
           Bidi Architect
           Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts
           IBM Israel
           Phone: +972 2 5888802    Fax: +972 2 5870333    Mobile: +972 52 
2554160




"Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org> 
Sent by: www-international-request@w3.org
10/11/2004 22:15

To
<www-international@w3.org>
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Subject
New article for REVIEW: An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses








http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please 
send any comments to www-international@w3.org.

The article provides a high level introduction to the current situation 
with regard to the use of multilingual Web addresses (URIs) for linking to 
resources on the Web. It tries to avoid getting too technical, although it 
does attempt to explain some of the implementation detail in a simple 
fashion.


============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

W3C Internationalization:
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