RE: Posted draft of URI comparison finding

I am somewhat baffled by the suggestion that it is not clear what a
character is in the context of IRI comparison.  IRIs are defined by a
BNF; an IRI is a sequence of characters - a string - matching that
BNF.

To talk of a binary comparison seems quite wrong to me.  Two namespace
IRIs that are compared do not always come from the normalized
attribute values in two namespace declarations.  In fact, the
canonical case is surely comparing an IRI that does come from a
namespace declaration with one that is specified in a spec.  There is
no reason to suppose that these will be encoded in the same way (the
former might well be a UTF-16 string, while the latter might well be a
literal 8-bit string in a C program, for example).

The current namespace draft states that in a namespace declaration,
the IRI reference is the normalized value of the attribute.  This is
clearly a sequence of characters; what the characters are is described
in section 3.3.3 of the XML spec.

-- Richard

Received on Friday, 29 November 2002 11:23:45 UTC