RE: [xri] URI/IRI/XRI - what should extend what?

["Gabe Wachob" <gabe.wachob@amsoft.net>]

Marty-
	I think you may have a misconception about all these things.

	First, URI's are defined with US-ASCII only. If you don't do
US-ASCII, you don't do URI's. 
	So the folks who aren't Engish-speakers decided they wanted to play
in the URI world and so they defined IRI. IRI is basically just the way of
encoding the full range of UTF-8 characters into URI-legal strings. 

	So if we don't leverage IRI, we just have to rewrite IRI. I don't
see any point in that. 

	If you want to support XRI, you have to support the full set of
internationalized characters, and the easiest way to do that is to use IRI
libraries which are pretty ubiquitous now. There are a lot of Unicode corner
cases and I'm fairly certain not everyone handles all of Unicode correctly.
But this is one of those areas where 99.99% of the cases are handled
correctly and we should be happy with that. 

	So, I'm not sure its really a big deal for a vendor to support URI
and not IRI. And if they don't want to support IRI, then they *really* won't
want to support XRI. 

	-Gabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Schleiff, Marty [mailto:marty.schleiff@boeing.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 9:28 AM
> To: xri@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [xri] URI/IRI/XRI - what should extend what?
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> The XRI Syntax spec describes IRI as extending the character set of URI,
> and then describes XRI as extending the syntactic elements (but not the
> character set) of IRI. If I were a product vendor, it would sound to me
> like in order to support XRI, my products would first (or also) have to
> support IRI. I might think IRI support sounds complex with lots of
> implications to my install base, so if I decide not to support IRI it
> also means I wouldn't be supporting XRI.
> To me it seems like IRI adds lots of complexity to XRI. I'd rather just
> say XRI is a URI scheme, restricted to UTF-8 like any other URI. In XRI
> let's not even worry about other encodings. When international
> characters are needed in an XRI, then the IRI spec deals with how to do
> it. Let's leave the complexity in the IRI spec. Of course we could
> include a section in the XRI Syntax spec that gives examples of how to
> convert a URI with a scheme of xri:// into an IRI according to the steps
> described in RFC 3987.
> I put this idea on the wiki (item #3.11 under XRI Syntax).
> 
> Marty.Schleiff@boeing.com; CISSP
> Associate Technical Fellow - Cyber Identity Specialist
> Computing Security Infrastructure
> (206) 679-5933