Re: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.

At 2:24 PM +1000 4/30/03, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

>How will it improve interoperability to either wait for everything else
>to improve? If everyone does that, nothing will ever move forward,
>but that is the point isn't it?

No, not at all. It just needs to move forward in the right order. 
First internationalized domain names, then IRIs, and then the various 
specs such as  Namespaces in XML 1.1 that depend on IRIs. It's 
ridiculous to publish a spec with a normative dependence on another 
spec that's not yet complete. Doing this backwards will just create 
unnecessary, confusing incompatibilities between different 
technologies. I'm already worried about XLink and XInclude. 
Namespaces are much more core. We have to be very conservative here, 
and not take any chances of having the rug pulled out from under us. 
For example, what would happen if someone made a convincing argument 
that percent escaping in IRIs should be based on UTF-16 rather than 
UTF-8? Not that I expect that to happen, mind you, but I don't want 
to commit IRIs until the possibility has been ruled out by an adopted 
spec.

It's more important to do this right than to do it soon. We've lived 
with URIs and Namespaces 1.0 for years. We can limp along for another 
year or two if we have to. IRIs will eventually be finished, and then 
this can move forward.
-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2003 07:54:30 UTC