- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 28 Apr 2003 22:41:58 -0500
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: WWW-Tag <www-tag@w3.org>
On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 17:16, Tim Bray wrote: > We spent essentially our whole meeting today on our issue 27: > > http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#IRIEverywhere-27 > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Oct/0186 > > I had proposed that we close the issue as follows: > > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Apr/0090.html > > Misha Wolf and Stuart Williams had followed up with useful commentary at > the detail level. > > Today, we were unable to come close to consensus in favor of saying > "Yes, use IRIs." The purpose of this note is to try to enumerate the > problems causing the blockage. > > 1. Roy Fielding is concerned about the fact that the IRI spec isn't > finished, saying "it would be ridiculous to say we support IRIs" when it > isn't clear yet what they are. > > 2. Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee both are nervous about separating > issue 27 from our Issue 15, about when URIs compare equal. Adding fuel > to the fire is the latest draft of the namespaces 1.1 spec: > > http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/CR-xml-names11-20021218/ > > Which in section 9 says namespaces can be IRIs, and in section 3 > requires that all comparison of names be done based on exact string > equality. > > Dan (apparently) thinks this is correct and appropriate. Yes, I think string equality is the necessary and sufficient algorithm for comparing identifiers; it remains only to decide what string to do the comparison on, and I think the 18Dec namespaces spec take a clear, defensible position; and I observe lots of software that's consistent with that position. I think it would be counter-productive to come to some resolution ala "yes, IRIs are gonna be great; use them in your specs" without actually being clear about what we're endorsing. I can imagine other designs that would be equally clear; I've seen maybe one or two sketched, but I can't really get my head around why we wouldn't go with what's in section 2 of http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/CR-xml-names11-20021218/ and as to the pointers into the future in section 9, they seem to apply to data only, not to software; i.e. it seems to me that you can build software today that will work, and will continue to work regardless of how IRIs end up being specified. (well, to be more precise: I think this puts requirements on the design of IRIs that I think should and will be respected). > TimBL on the > other hand thinks that this will cause breakage, as future > URI-comparison software will probably do things like regard %7e and %7E > as the same, and thus will produce inconsistent results. > > I share concerns about the wording in the namespaces draft, BTW. Roy > suggested that it should be reworded to say that no canonicalization is > required before namespace comparison rather than say that ~wilbur, > %7ewilbur, and %7Ewilbur "are different", because in fact per the RFCs > they're not different. But this wouldn't stop me saying that it's OK to > start writing in support for internationalized identifiers. > > In any case, at the moment, we're paralyzed on this issue because of > these unresolved differences. This is on the face of it at one level > ridiculous, because the first W in WWW stands for "World" and it's a > no-brainer that identifiers ought to include non-ASCII characters. > > I think we do generally agree that the IRI work is in a good and useful > direction, and that one thing that would be totally useful would be to > get behind the work on the IRI draft: > > http://www.w3.org/International/iri-edit/ > > And get that nailed down and blessed. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Monday, 28 April 2003 23:41:38 UTC