Re: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 18:20, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Actually, what I said is that it is absurd to recommend IRIs when the
> IRI definition is unknown, and that absurdity is demonstrated by the
> technical errors now present in the namespaces 1.1 CR section 9.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> More importantly, it is because the namespaces draft cannot declare them
> to be different because a normalizer has every right (and in some cases
> a responsibility) to normalize those URIs before the namespace processor
> even sees them.

For example?

I find this argument hard to follow without a concrete example here.


>   Namespaces would therefore be violating the definition 
> of
> URIs by declaring them to be different in spite of their equivalence.
> Therefore, Namespaces shouldn't say that the namespaces (identified)
> are different, even for a limited purpose.  What it should say is that
> the identifier is assumed to be in normal form (because consistency has
> its own rewards) and that no additional normalization is required
> prior to comparison (for efficiency reasons), noting that *because* of
> this decision, inconsistent use of equivalent URIs in the namespace
> attributes will result in a regrettable, but not fatal, false negative
> match when they are mixed within the same process.  Authors are 
> therefore
> encouraged to be consistent for the sake of efficiency.
> 
> That applies to both IRIs and URIs.  In fact, it applies to anything
> that might appear in those attributes: there is no technical need for
> the Namespace attribute syntax and processing to be dependent on IRIs
> and URIs.  There is a social need, but that can be accomplished without
> introducing dependencies on nonexistent specifications.
> 
> > 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.
[...]

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Monday, 28 April 2003 23:44:13 UTC