--On Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:39 +0100 Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 23/10/2012 00:32, Mark Nottingham wrote:
...
The underlying point that people seem to be making is that
there's legitimate need for URIs to be a separate concept
from "strings that will become URIs." By collapsing them into
one thing, you're doing those folks a disservice. Browser
implementers may not care, but it's pretty obvious that lots
of other people do.
Thanks for bringing this point out. It was explained to me in
1993 by TBL and Robert Cailliau that URLs (the only term used
then, I think) should never be typed in by a user, and
preferably never even seen by a user. It's because that
doctrine was abandoned a year or so later that we have this
problem today. I think there would be value in a document
making this clear, as a framework for clearly separating the
specification of what is allowable as a URI on the wire from
what is acceptable as a user input string (UIS?).
UIS to URI conversion may well end up as a heuristic algorithm.
Very useful perspective, IMO.
Seen that way, IRIs might then be considered a different flavor
of UIS. Less heuristic than some, but not a flavor of URI.
best,
john