RE: Comments: draft-hollenbeck-ietf-xml-guidelines-00.txt

[Graham Klyne <GK-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:00 PM 4/9/02 -0400, Hollenbeck, Scott wrote:
> > 3. Section 3 talks about internationalization.  I think a
> > reference to
> > [charmod] would be in order:
> > <http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/>.  Hopefully,
> > it will be stable by the time this draft makes BCP.
>
> Is there a specific section that you have in mind?  The charmod WD provides
> "a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide
> Web"; what portion of the WD might be applicable to the text encoding
> paragraph?

That was before I'd read the later sections.  I don't think more is needed 
here.

> > 6. Section 4.7:  Also mention data: URL: ??
>
> I'm not sure I understand - can you suggest additional text?

Hmm... I'm not claiming this is a Good Idea, just something to 
consider.  Add one more paragraph to section 4.7:

[[[
Another way to include modest amounts of binary data in an XML document 
might be to use a data: URL with base64 encoding; e.g. (adapted from RFC 2397):

   <image
   href="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw
   AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz
   ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp
   a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl
   ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis
   F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH
   hhx4dbgYKAAA7"/>

This approach might be usable with protocols like APEX [x] that have in 
their design a provision for either inline XML content or a URI reference 
to external content.  A data: URL could be an alternative to (say) a cid: 
URL referencing another part of a multipart/related MIME structure.
]]]


> > 7. Section 5.  Also reference [charmod] here?
> > <http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/>
>
> Again, is there a particular section of the WD that fits into the flow of
> this section, and/or how would you suggest weaving in a reference?

OK.  Either an addition to section 5.1, or a new sub-section in section 
5.  I don't really understand this stuff very well, but am aware that there 
are some tricky issues that I believe are being addressed by the [charmod] 
work.  But I imagine something like:

[[[
There are a number of tricky issues that can arise when using extended 
character sets with XML document formats:

- there are different ways of representing characters consisting of 
combining characters

- there has been some debate about whether URIs should be represented using 
a restricted US-ASCII subset or arbitrary Unicode (c.f. "URI character 
sequence" vs "original character sequence" in  RFC 2396).

Some of these issues are discussed, with recommendations, in [charmod].
]]]

I'm sorry this isn't really adequate as suggested text, but I hope it 
points to the kinds of issue I'm suggesting might be mentioned.

...

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>