Re: [charmodReview-17] replacing all URIs with IRIs

On 25/05/2002 01:18:20 Aaron Swartz wrote:
> On Friday, May 24, 2002, at 05:04 PM, Misha.Wolf@reuters.com wrote:
[...]

> >> break many utilities which have made the assumption that RDF
> >> identifiers
> > Which utilities?
>
> All the current RDF tools, I think. I don't think any of them have been
> updated to support normalization or Unicode storage. Certainly all the
> tools I've written don't support it. If you take a look at the RDF
> Validator[1] you'll find that it %-encodes characters like ü, as most of
> the RDF tools I know do.

On the other hand, the description of N-Triples says (in section 3.3
URI References)[1]:

| Characters above the US-ASCII range are made available by the
| \u or \U escapes as described in section Strings for ranges
| [#x80-#xFFFF] and [#x10000-#x10FFFF] respectively.

> >> I can understand presenting strings this way for user-display and
> >> user-entry but storing them this way and making them the official
> >> encoding seems to be going too far. I would think that simply using
> >> UTF-8 %-encoding would be fine for these purposes.
> >
> > How do you propose to display these strings in a meaningful manner?
> > %HH encoding is not invertible, except in the case of ASCII characters.
> > This is because the character encoding is not, in general, known.
>
> That is why I said UTF-8. I am fine with requiring a specific character
> encoding to make the process reversible.

RFC 2396, in specifying the use of %HH escaping, does not confine its
use to UTF-8.  There are plenty of URIs out there which use %HH to
escape other character encodings.  Once you have a %HH-escaped URI,
there is no way back, unless you know how it was created.  If an RDF
database contains some %HH-escaped URIs, how can anyone know whether
they arrived %HH-escaped, or whether the %HH-escaping was applied just
before their insertion in the database?

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-testcases/#sec-uri-encoding

Misha Wolf
I18N WG Chair

> --
> Aaron Swartz· [http://www.aaronsw.com/]
>




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Received on Saturday, 25 May 2002 08:20:12 UTC