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

Hi Mati,

Thanks for these comments. See below...


> From: Matitiahu Allouche [mailto:matial@il.ibm.com] 
> Sent: 11 November 2004 08:29
> To: Richard Ishida
> Cc: www-international@w3.org; www-international-request@w3.org
> Subject: 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". 

I changed the text.  

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


Fairly near the beginning of the article, (beginning of the section 'The
Problem') IRI is introduced for the first time with: 

"We will refer to web addresses that contain characters outside those
defined by RFC 2396 (ie. roughly stated, non-ASCII characters) as
Internationalized Resource Identifiers or IRIs." and bolding for the new
terms. The earlier changes I made where URI is introduced now look more like
this too, so hopefully this is not such a problem now.


> 
> 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! 

This indeed was a problem.  I went through the document and converted some
URIs to IRIs.  Thanks.

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

True. Changed.

I guess I was trying to say something like 'ordinary mortals', ie. not the
sort of person who can read a W3C or IETF spec, much less escaped URI
characters.  ;-)


> 
> 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." 

Thanks.  Done.


> 
> 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? 

Let me get back to you on this after double checking.

> 
> 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. 


A perennial problem.  I was thinking to provide a link to a free TT/OT
Japanese font, and create a alternative PDF document for people for whom
that solution doesn't work.  I guess I should have done that already for
you. Sorry.


> 
> 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>
> cc
> 	
> 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:
> http://www.w3.org/International/ 
> 
> Publication blog:
> http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2004 20:28:48 UTC