Requirements: Basing XRI syntax on IRIs vs URIs

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@onename.com>]

This is a new thread to respond to Gabe's points about the revised
Internationalization requirement - 3.4.6 in the v5 Requirements doc.
Gabe said:

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Wachob, Gabe [mailto:gwachob@visa.com]
>Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 12:25 PM
>To: Drummond Reed; xri@lists.oasis-open.org
>Subject: RE: [xri] Groups - xri-requirements-1.0-draft-05b.doc uploaded
>
>Drummond-
>
>        In section 3.4.6 (internationalization) - there is a
discussiong going on at the W3C TAG (issue named
>something like "IRIEverywhere") where the appropriateness of where IRIs
should be used is being discussed.
>It is clear, for example, that IRIs cannot be used everywhere URIs can
be used. The issue is whether *future*
>specs should refer to IRIs or URIs. An IRI can be "cast down" into a
URI unambiguously, but because there >are several ways to translate
unicode into ascii, its not always possible to unambigously convert an
URI back
>into an IRI (without some context like the encoding used to go from IRI
to URI). So, while I think we should
>definitely address IRIs and XRIs, I don't think XRIs should expect to
be solving the problems that IRIs have
>with the relationshipt to URIs. We *could* propose a way to encode the
things that are needed to
>unambiguously convert a URI back into an IRI, but I'm guessing that
would actually break the IRI spec. I'm
>going out beyond my competency here I think.
>
>        Bottom line is that we either have to wait for the IRI things
to shake out, or we have to tread new ground
>in i18n. I *definitely* want XRIs to be "i18n enabled", but I'm a
little worried about us planning on achieving
>that in the short term by relying on IRIs.

Gabe, you articulate the issue well. It's a complicated one and one I
know that Nat and others need to evaluate closely. That's why I
suggested wording requirement 3.4.6 as "The TC shall also evaluate
whether XRI syntax should conform to the Internationalized Resource
Identifier specification."

Is there better wording we can use? Nat, can you state it better?

=Drummond