Rug-pulling (Re: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27)

> 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.

IRIs would only be adopted if they basically agree with the escaping
method already used throughout the XML family specs.  We don't have
to be conservative: users can evaluate the trade-off, just like any
encoding-related issue. 

Additionally, Larry Masinter's RFC (previously quoted) proposed UTF-8.
UTF-16 is a red herring.

So UTF-16 is not a reason not to support the Charmod policy of allowing 
IRIs everywhere. However, deciding to support IRIs everywhere (as long 
as IRIs reflect the Charmod and XML-family practise) does not mean that 
an IRI draft should be normatively referenced from W3C specs while it is
still a draft, just as a procedural matter. But tt does not need to be: XML 
and the other specs can be, for the time being.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2003 10:03:17 UTC