Subject: Minutes from informal IETF/W3C meeting about HTML5 work

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:08:25 +1100

Various folks from the IETF and W3C's HTML5 WG got together in San  
Francisco last week to discuss the parts of that work.

Rough minutes are at:
   http://esw.w3.org/topic/IETF_HTML5_Meeting_March_2009

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

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From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:32:13 +0900

[copied to [email-masked], which should be used for all public 
discussion related to IRIs]

 From there:

- HTML5's URI section (DanConnolly and Larry Masinter to work on this;
   e.g. HTML WG action 68)
   - We discussed IDN and URI/IRI (international domain names vs.
     HTML5/W3C use of IRI). Changes to IRI would impact specs like Atom.
     Larry advocated revising this spec, others were less enthusiastic.
     It would be a big undertaking, and it wasn't clear that Martin
     Dürst was available.
   - Rob Sayre suggested the name "Hypertext References".
     This was met with wide approval.
   - Action Item: Dan to reformat the document as an Internet Draft

Some comments:

- My ability is limited, but not zero. Just recently, I had a major
   blackout period due to upgrading of notebook/OS/emailer/... Not
   quite out of it yet. (At least, I'm now able to write my name
   correctly in email after all these years of working hard for
   internationalization on the Web :-(.

- I managed to absorb a major 'variant' of IRIs for the XML folks
   under the name 'Legacy Extended IRIs'
   (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-iri-bis-05#section-7).
   Much of that text was originally from the XML side (thanks to
   Norm Walsh, Richard Tobin, Henry Thomson), but I tweaked it quite
   a bit for tone, and we went back and forth to try and make sure
   we had all the differences covered.
   I think the exercise was successful in the sense that it was
   satisfactory for the parties involved (XML specs community and
   IRI spec authorship), and paper (or these days electrons) is
   patient anyway. I'm still not sure what kind of reaction there
   will be from a wider community (hint, hint: feedback welcome!)

- The motivation for doing the above were about as follows:
   - It's better to have everything in place, so people can look it
     up in one go.
   - It's better to have it under the same name, and not send the
     wrong message with names (the originally proposed name for
     LEIRIs was "human readable identifiers", which was misleading
     in many ways)
   - It's better to allow it but warn against it than to ignore it
     in silence.
   - The IRI spec (some pre RFC 3987 drafts) allowed spaces and some
     other strictly ASCII non-URI characters, which was the reason
     they got allowed is some XML specs, so part of the reason was
     that the IRI spec also bore some responsibility.

- Last time I looked at the discrepancies between the URI/IRI
   specs (RFC 3986/7) and the HTML practice (as far as documented),
   my impression was that some parts of it could rather easily
   be absorbed/buffered in the IRI spec, but for some others,
   the URI spec would be more appropriate. As an example, I think
   what HTML browsers do with buggy %-encoding sequences has
   nothing to do with the first I in IRI, which stands for
   Internationalization.

So much for the moment.    Regards,     Martin.

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From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:10:27 +1100

Just thinking out loud -- is it *really* a good idea to have separate  
URI and IRI lists?

Cheers,