Subject: Re: [Iptel] comments on rfc2806bis

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 12:36:40 EST

In a message dated 12/4/2002 11:11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Confusion reins.
[MAP] I'll second that.

Here's another. (I'll stick my neck out first - go ahead, chop it off - but 
E.123 (Feb 2001) is the international standard for the representation of 
telephone numbers in (printed) human readable format. It defines the format 
Brian finds on his business card, including the / and spaces. Yes, I think 
ITU-T went a little out of their scope when they added web addresses and 
e-mail address formats to E.123, but that's another issue.)

Now the next step of confusion: A footnote in E.123 indicates that the hypen 
is used in some countries as a separator, but that in the Netherlands it is 
used to indicate the point at which the dialer should wait for another dial 
tone.

Another confusion for the tel:uri: E.123 says that "the ( ) should not be 
used in an international number".

In fact, in E.123, the "spacing" symbols are: spaces, dots, and hypens. It 
says "only spaces should be used in an international number" and a footnote 
implies that dots and hypens are allowed but should be phased out. E.123 
defines "procedural" symbols as: +, parentheses, slash.

I believe some time ago I made the point that there are two separate things:

1. human representation of a number (entry on or display by a terminal)
2. representation in the protocol ( or "on-the wire")

Attempts to make these the same are leading to extreme difficulty, bad 
compromises, endless discussions, etc. I understand the reason for wanting to 
make the actual protocol human readable, but other things are being added 
that would cause a lot more trouble for a human than the lack of separators.

E.123 covers the human interface representation (item 1). This should not be 
the issue in the tel:uri. IPTEL needs to concentrate on item 2. If one wanted 
to design a human interface according to the principles in E.123, there might 
be, for example, a case in which one could enter multiple telephone numbers 
separated by a slash (as on Brian's busines card). The functionality might 
translate this into multiple tel:uri's. (I don't see a single tel:url having 
multiple telephone numbers.)

Mike Pierce
Artel

---

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 12:48:22 -0500

There has been no real, technical problem identified with keeping the 
visual separators, beyond "taste" problem. Can we please close this issue?

People can indeed populate tel URIs according to the guidelines of E.123 
(minus the spaces, which are generally a pain in URIs). Just like nobody 
can force people to use the correct ISBN hyphenation, we just have to 
make sure that nothing breaks if a poor user hasn't read E.123 lately. 
Obviously, functionality is unaffected by such user punctuation mistakes.

The argument about human readability are not with the tel URI, but with 
RFC 2396. I suggest you take your complaints to the relevant URI working 
group.

[email-masked] wrote:
> Here's another. (I'll stick my neck out first - go ahead, chop it off - 
> but E.123 (Feb 2001) is the international standard for the 
> representation of telephone numbers in (printed) human readable format. 
> It defines the format Brian finds on his business card, including the / 
> and spaces. Yes, I think ITU-T went a little out of their scope when 
> they added web addresses and e-mail address formats to E.123, but that's 
> another issue.)
> 
> Now the next step of confusion: A footnote in E.123 indicates that the 
> hypen is used in some countries as a separator, but that in the 
> Netherlands it is used to indicate the point at which the dialer should 
> wait for another dial tone.
> 
> Another confusion for the tel:uri: E.123 says that "the ( ) should not 
> be used in an international number".
> 
> In fact, in E.123, the "spacing" symbols are: spaces, dots, and hypens. 
> It says "only spaces should be used in an international number" and a 
> footnote implies that dots and hypens are allowed but should be phased 
> out. E.123 defines "procedural" symbols as: +, parentheses, slash.
> 
> compromises, endless discussions, etc. I understand the reason for 
> wanting to make the actual protocol human readable, but other things are 
> being added that would cause a lot more trouble for a human than the 
> lack of separators.
> 
> E.123 covers the human interface representation (item 1). This should 
> not be the issue in the tel:uri. IPTEL needs to concentrate on item 2. 
> If one wanted to design a human interface according to the principles in 
> E.123, there might be, for example, a case in which one could enter 
> multiple telephone numbers separated by a slash (as on Brian's busines 
> card). The functionality might translate this into multiple tel:uri's. 
> (I don't see a single tel:url having multiple telephone numbers.)
> 
> 
> Mike Pierce
> Artel
> 

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