sXBL: Resource Identifiers

Dear Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group,

  In the latest sXBL Working Draft, there are a number of problems that
relate to the use of URI terminology and language elements that refer to
such terminology. Relevant documents in this regard would be RFC 2396,
the RFC2396bis Internet Draft, the IRI Internet Draft, the definitions
for resource identifiers in the SVG 1.2 Working Draft, the W3C XML
Schema Data Type Recommendation, and the RelaxNG specification, none of
which is referenced from the document. I have outlined relevant problems
in this regard in

  http://www.w3.org/mid/41aa64e7.1905102963@smtp.bjoern.hoehrmann.de

of which most are relevant for the sXBL Working Draft. In particular,
the sXBL specification must define for the following examples whether
this is conforming, how user agents must form the HTTP request for the
resource (all references below refer to HTTP resources) and in case of
successful retrieval, whether the fragment identifier must be considered
a match for the following IDs

  * id = "Björn"
  * id = "Björn"

Each example has several concrete test case documents, they vary in
encoding which would be

  * ISO-8859-1
  * UTF-8
  * a non-Unicode encoding that allows to encode the relevant
    characters without the use of XML character references

and in their use of character references

  * all non-ASCII characters are XML character references
  * all non-ASCII characters are included directly if possible,
    as character references if not

This applies to both the referring and the referenced resource. The
refferring resources further vary in how the reference is included,
as a relative and an absolute reference. The example are as follows,

  a) Björn#Björn
  b) as a) but with the path in NFD
  c) as a) but with the fragment identifier in NFD
  d) as a) but with both components in NFD

for each of the above further for all the beforementioned character
encodings with replacements for

  a) the fragment identifier, %xx escapes for all illegal octets
     after encoding it in the encoding as above
  b) as above but for the path
  c) as above but for both components

and finally as all of the above examples with absolute references that
refer to a host that is different from the host of the base reference
that is or includes "Björn" for which the same variants apply as for the
path component. (There may be errors but you should get the intent.)

I further urge the Working Group to include proper test cases for this
part of the specification in the sXBL test suite, the SVG test suite
lacks such tests and implementations are in my experience usually not
conforming nor interoperable in their non-conformance. It is also note-
worthy that the documents cited above provide, in parts, no answer or
conflicting answers.

Please cite the exact specification text and the relevant normative
references when adressing this comment. I'll submit similar comments
for the SVG 1.2 specification once you publish a Working Draft for it
that includes the relevant sections.

regards.

Received on Saturday, 11 September 2004 01:09:30 UTC