On 2014/08/30 03:38, John C Klensin wrote:
(1) WHATEWG and W3C are charging ahead with an "Encoding" specification that will apparently be normatively referenced from HTML5. With luck, an update to/ replacement for the very important "Charmod" spec will be right behind it. The recommendations of those two documents are different from the proposed PRECIS ones. One way of looking at those specs in the PRECIS context is that they represent yet another profile and that, if two or three (or more if IDNA is counted) are acceptable, than one more doesn't make much difference. At the other extreme, some people have taken the position about the W3C Charmod and Encoding specs that the web, web browsers, web applications, and web access to other protocols so dominates the Internet that any conflicting specifications are irrelevant (or various worse words). If the latter view is correct than the PRECIS effort is, to a considerable degree, a waste of time and, worse, a source of more confusion, at least for any protocol that might be accessed via a URI or from a web page. My own view is that reality lies somewhere between those positions, but my ability to predict the near-term future is notoriously bad.
I might be wrong, but I see no connection between the "Encoding" spec and PRECIS. "Encoding" is about codepoints (Unicode scalar values,...) <=> bytes, and that's below PRECIS.
I also don't think that an update of the "Charmod" spec will be "right behind it". Actually, there are several parts to the "Charmod" spec, in different stages:
Charmod Fundamentals (http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/) is a Rec since 2005 and some parts of it are somewhat outdated (if one believes the "Encoding" spec, then e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#C020 would be outdated), but starting an update would be a major undertaking and there sure would be much better ways to spend I18N resources.
Charmod Normalization (http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-norm/, nowadays the subtitle is "String Matching and Searching") is in active but rather slow development, at Working Draft stage. It is probably the one most related to PRECIS. The differences are that A) it deals with both identifiers and content, whereas PRECIS deals with identifiers (or what they are called) only; and B) it (in one way or another over the timespan of way more than 10 years) only recommends NFC, whereas PRECIS provides further restrictions. Whether this part of Charmod will proceed "right behind" "Encoding" or not depends on the meaning of "right behind", but the above differences A and B have been around since these issues were first introduced into IDNA and Charmod drafts, so taking that as News of any kind would be very surprising.
There isn't any fundamental conflict between IDNA/PRECIS and Charmod Normalization. Discussions about the specific versions of IDNA apart, browsers and other infrastructure in perfectly capable to use IDNA checks or conversions on the domain part of an URI/IRI/URL even if putting the rest of an URI/IRI/URL and the rest of a document is just recommended to be in NFC. Things would be different if Charmod Normalization suddenly started to recommend or require NFD or some such.
Charmod Resource Identifiers (http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod-resid/) formally is in Candidate Recommendation since 2004, and that shows how little attention it got over the years, although the use of non-Unicode characters in Web addresses (use whatever acronym you want) is certainly a reality at least in some important contexts (such as HTML, XML, and RDF).
Regards, Martin. _______________________________________________ precis mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/precis
