RE: editing the IRI spec

On Sat, 28 Mar 2009, Larry Masinter wrote:
> 
> I think it would be "normative overlap" to have an IRI document say one 
> thing and another document describe something else. This would be 
> confusing and disruptive.

I agree. Dan's document, and before it, the section in HTML5, only exist 
because when I e-mailed the uri@w3.org list, it was made clear that there 
was no interest in making a new version of the URI RFC that defined error 
handling. If we can't update the URI spec, then another spec is the only 
alternative I can see.

Note though that Dan's document, and before it, the section in HTML5, 
don't actually contradict the URI and IRI specs; they just define extra 
processing that is applied before and after applying the URI rules.

I would much rather we update the URI spec to combine the URI rules, the 
IRI rules, and the rules from Dan's document so that we have a single spec 
that both defines the allowed syntax, and the processing for all input 
strings, in a manner that is compatible with today's tools (networking 
libraries, command-line tools, browsers, e-mail clients, etc).

Doing this should be relatively simple (there's no design work and no 
decisions to make, it's all a matter of integrating the existing rules and 
checking that they match existing software and fixing them where they 
don't). We just need a volunteer to edit the spec (Dan?), and agreement 
that this is the right thing to do.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 29 March 2009 07:42:08 UTC